"My Diary Chapter 3" Szegal Hanna & Dévai Alexandra

Lea Hanna Szegal started taking photos in the mid-90s, at the age of 16, with a Praktica MTL 5B camera. Together with her brothers she was an active participant of the skateboarding subculture, so she got to know and document the everyday life of the skateboard gangs in Budapest.

"When I was a teenager, I spent most of my time on the skateboard rink. I managed to catch a good moment while taking photos at one of the competitions, and that's how my interest in photography, which later became a passion, started. I didn't think about photography conceptually, I just followed my instincts and enjoyed the compositions, my goal was to document the moment."

After high school, he attended the Práter Street School of Photography, then the photojournalism training of MÚOSZ. During the internship at MTI, he mastered both lab work and manual retouching. He graduated from MOME with a degree in communication and art management, but never gave up photography: he has done photojournalism for skateboarding magazines such as Edge, and his shots of the World Skateboard Championships in Germany have also appeared in the Népszabadság colour supplement. In 2022, the Hungarian National Geographic asked Hanna and her siblings to photograph the Hungarian skateboarding culture in the context of the Olympic debut of skateboarding in 2022. A six-page article about them was published.

The exhibition here is a chapter of photos from the 90s and 2000s. A selection of moments, movements and faces caught during everyday yet defining events, where the most intimate surroundings, brothers, girlfriends, friends and Tony Hawk are presented through the eyes of Hanna.

The current exhibition is a reimagining project with Alexandra Dévai from the film world, showing the impressions of the feeling of life at that time, which fundamentally determined the later trends in extreme sports genre in the field of skateboarding and music. The present exhibition is a retrospective representation through which we explore the present in the light of the past. We invite generations into a conversation about what has happened since ...

The exhibition is open from 25 July to 21 August.