The Horus Archive is a one-man enterprise. It was conceived in the early seventies by Sándor Kardos, a cinematographer with a good number of successful Hungarian feature films to his credit. I first met him while working on a documentary film in Ózd, northern Hungary, sometime in the early seventies. He was the cameraman and I was the assistant to the director, László B. Révész. Since that time Kardos has had a remarkable career, being the cinematographer for a number of the most prominent Hungarian directors, including András Jeles, Géza Bereményi and Péter Timár.

During those days in Ózd I quickly made friends with Kardos and started to frequent his home in Kertész Street in the centre of Budapest. Kardos's late father had worked as a photographer in the 50s and had occasionally taken his son along with him on assignments. Kardos later described these:

My father was a photographer who travelled the country at a time when most people still had no cameras. As a child I often went along with him and worked with him. Mostly we took the type of photographs that I am now collecting. I could not collect anything that had to be paid for, but then I discovered that I did not have to. There was a touch of defiance in my decision to recover stuff from the rubbish that nobody wanted, but if I took a hundred photos out of rubbish bins I was sure to find at least ten special pieces that were worth putting away. I think my whole collection of photographs makes the point that photographic art is not necessarily what people regard as such, the official trend, that is; it also includes all that those nameless photographers produce, who perhaps take a good picture only by luck. Yet, I seriously believe that such a photograph can be just as valuable as the one a professional photographer takes. After all amateurs and professionals are governed by the same laws, perhaps with the exception of the truly great.

The Archive is built up of all kinds of snapshots, most of them taken by unknown photographers. This constitutes the basic principles of the philosophy of Kardos. Anyone can take an exceptionally good picture. In Kardos's words:

What matters is that the finger of God should be there at the exposure when the picture is born. Earlier on I was fascinated by the thought that a photograph is made in a single moment. This cannot happen in any other art form, as in each case you must have a preconception. This is not true of photography. The truly great photographers developed in themselves a kind of constant emotional readiness, while also possessing a photographic skill which helps them select the moment. Amateurs, too, are able to capture the moment, only they do it by chance, without realizing anything about the whole thing.

After some precursory attempts, he began collecting systematically in the early seventies. As to the first photograph in the collection: I clearly remember that one. My father-in-law was in it, at the age of 9 or 10. He was attending a Catholic school. In the photograph the entire class is dressed up as Hussars, with their guns appearing to be shooting directly into the camera. My father-in-law's was the role of captain giving the order to fire. In the photograph a nun with a gun sits next to her class with a wide smile on her face. As my wife Fruzsina and I examined the photograph more closely we found innumerable additional details. I then realized that this type of photograph is much more interesting than anything I could ever take myself.

At first, the rapidly growing collection did not even have a name. Horus was eventually proposed by Kardos. The painter and art critic Albert Kováts explains:

Horus was an Egyptian deity whose all-seeing eye represented the Sun. This was damaged by Seth, the god of evil. The eye was then repaired and restored by Thot, the god of wisdom and truth. The Egyptian hieroglyph that represents and shows the entire eye has the meaning of "one" or "whole". The components of this picture of the eye represent the fractions of the whole by halving every part. For example, the ball of the eye means "1/2" and the sign for the eyebrow means "1/8" and so on in infinitely smaller fractions. This mythology works as a metaphor for my collection, once you consider all those amateur photographers who make their millions of pictures which I am attempting to collect and assemble. The totality is again reassembled until one eye sees everything.

The "rubbish" that Kardos earlier referred to in fact consists of the rejects of modern photographic laboratories. These laboratories develop and print amateur photos by the million, thus providing an endless source for the archive. It was during the seventies that these mechanized laboratories made their appearance in this country. Several of Kardos's friends and acquaintances took part in both the collection and the selection.

The collection attracted attention early on, and in the late seventies and the first half of the eighties several exhibitions were arranged, the first one an appendix to the large historical exhibition in Székesfehérvár in 1979, "The Beginnings of Photography in Hungary", followed by several others in galleries in Budapest and other parts of the country. A selection from the Horus Archive was used to illustrate the 1982 book A Fotográfozásról (On Photography). Edited by András Bán, this provided a selection of articles written on photography in Hungarian. The outstanding event in the first half of the 1980s was the publication of the book Leletek a magyar fotográfia történetébôl (Findings from the History of Hungarian Photography), produced jointly by Kardos and the historian Gábor Szilágyi. This was the first instance that photos from the Horus Archive were presented in a selection introducing a period in Hungarian photography. By showing pictures taken by unknown photographers, Horus Archive offered an alternative history of photography.

The next major landmark for the Horus Archive came in 1985 when Arnold Dreyblatt appeared. Arnold is an avant-garde musician who toured Hungary with his band, The Orchestra of Excited Strings. Arnold, already a West Berlin resident for a number of years, recollects his first meeting with Kardos as follows: "In the autumn of 1985 I was in Budapest searching for a photograph which might be used as album cover for one of my recordings. In Budapest I came upon a book of photographs, Leletek (Findings) and Péter Forgács arranged for me to visit one of the co-editors, Sándor Kardos. I was told that Kardos had a large archive of old photographs.

This complex system of organizing the photographs into a meaningful whole practically evolved by itself. Kardos says: "In the course of time the material organized itself into at least 120 categories. These categories emerged only after I had already collected thousands of pictures. There is a special category of the most wonderful photographs, which forms the core of the collection. There are extensive categories of pictures in which people are shown with objects they are especially proud of, or which they very much want to get hold of. Naturally, there are overlaps and interconnections between the categories. My favourite category holds pictures in which something unexpected or unusual happens at the moment of exposure." We find categories with photographs in which people are shown with some weapon in their hands, in unusual or strange places or positions, in weird masks or costumes, or in obscene or sexual situations. These categories are peculiar, and possibly unique to the Horus Archive. It is obvious that the Horus Archive provides a contribution to the cultural history of photography and the use of photographs. "It is self-evident that the appearance of a sociological or psychological type in a picture would not procure selection, nor would the fact that a photograph is simply ‘beautiful'. The conjunction of fortuitous circumstances is also needed, the kind of circumstances that make a picture a masterpiece," Albert Kováts writes in connection with the Archive. The collection now holds between 25 to 30 thousand pictures.

Arnold Dreyblatt's record did, indeed, appear with a cover featuring a Horus photograph; even more important were, however, those personal contacts that Horus Archive made abroad through Arnold. The Dutch connection in particular mattered in this regard, as it led to a Horus exhibition in the Netherlands, organized by Het Apollohuis of Eindhoven, the same institute that published, in co-operation with the Hungarian firm Axon, a volume containing the core of the collection. The book's cover design resembled the familiar yellow boxes of Forte, a Hungarian manufacturer of photographic material. "The photos were sent to the Netherlands by Horus in yellow boxes like this, which gave us the idea to put this emblem on the cover, too, with Kardos's name in place of the word Forte," the book's designers, Tom Homburg and Jan Bolle explain. The exhibition was eventually also shown in Rotterdam and Brussels.

The next volume dealing with Horus Archive came out in 1990 with the title Peaceful Action, also from Het Apollohuis, this with two series of photos arranged in parallel. The two series were linked by a common theme. The book, with a green cover, presented photographs of the American army in Austria and the Soviet army in Hungary during the Second World War. The Hungarian pictures showing the Soviet army were taken in Dunavecse, just forty kilometres from Budapest. I remember the occasion when Kardos and I climbed into an attic to view the material. The photographs had been taken by a local photographer, obviously at the request of the soldiers who proudly displayed the wrist-watches they had snatched during the siege of Budapest; they were equally proud of their weapons and their mates.

It could not have been easy to acquire and store this Russian material in those Socialist times (back in the mid-1970s). The photographs had been developed on glass plates and were in such a poor condition after spending long years in the attic that we had to find a way to clean them. Dust and plaster permeated the emulsion so deeply that we thought it would be best to rinse them with water and then try to save them by fixing them anew. Still, many plates were unfortunately lost, but those that have survived are among Horus's most treasured pieces.

In 1991 the pictures of the green book were shown at exhibitions in Salzburg and Vienna and elsewhere, thanks to a local photographer, Kurt Kaindl, who provided the American material; a very finely executed portfolio was arranged from the Russian material for commercial purposes.

Again in 1991, Arnold Dreyblatt's hypertext opera Who's Who in Central and Eastern Europe 1993 had its premierein Berlin. As the opera unfolded, pictures from the Horus Archive were projected on a screen, along with film clips of Péter Forgács's Private Film Archive and the computerized entries from a book bearing the same name as the opera. The opera was also performed in Budapest in 1995.

A major change came in 1993. In May the Archive was turned into the Photographic History Fund, and has been functioning as such since then. Together with the already mentioned major exhibitions, the Archive has organized over 30 exhibitions of its material in the period since 1970; in addition, its photographs have been used as illustrations in a number of books.