Preface of photo book "Budapest A City Before the Millennium"
Written by Ivan Bacher

If we truly love someone, we no longer see them truly.
We can never again contemplate the loved one's features with cool detachment, we can never again weigh the virtues against the defects with any reliability.
If we love someone, we forgive them the wart disfiguring their countenance, we no longer notice the old wound on their forehead; they can be knock-kneed, cross-eyed, loquacious, lackadaisical or meddlesome Ð no matter, if we love them.
If someone belongs to us, if they are ours, or we theirs, their clothes can hang ever so awkwardly, they can be unshaven, their breath can, from time to time, smell of cheap table wine...
Especially if this someone lives with us, and we sleep together and wake up together, if we see them every day until night-time, we pay no heed to them any more, we take no note of them, we don't keep an eye out for them or watch for them. They are at our side Ð they are with us, and inside us anyway - and we know what they are like.
And yet, it sometimes happens that we come across a picture taken of a loved one, and we are taken aback:
Could this be her?
This knock-kneed, cross-eyed being with the scar?
Could she be ours?
Yes, indeed, more's the pity - no, it's no pity, she's the one.
When we look at Tamas Revesz's photographs of Budapest, we feel something very similar.
We are startled: Could this be Budapest? Could this really be our city, this unfinished, imperfect, disproportionate, scar-ridden, tired, sad, poor city?
And we nod: Yes, yes, indeed: this finished, whole, harmonious, healthy, throbbing, youthful, rich city.
The black and white photographs leave no doubt: Budapest is a city of startling contrasts. It is both beautiful and ugly, ostentatious and poor, filthy rich and poverty-stricken, a thousand years old and unfamiliarly new, restored, pampered and delapidated, dynamically developing and a thing of the past.
It's geographical situation is spectacular, its details enchanting.
But even the best part of its body is blemished by unsightly sores, scars, and wounds.
And though we see the healthy parts on the body of the city, it is still painful to compare its present aspect with the proud one it bore one hundred years ago.
One-hundred years ago, this city was an organic whole, harmonious, dynamic and seductive, even with its plaster facades.
It must have had its fair share of sad corners even then - poorhouses, slums, houses of ill repute.
But back then, even these were part of an organic whole.
Today there are no poorhouses in Budapest, just poor people, no slums, just destitution, no houses of ill repute, just a whole district overrun by "whores".
However, the recent photographs taken by Tamas Revesz do not compel us to dwell over-long on the Dickensian depths of the abject misery that has become a fixture of life in Millenial Budapest.
Yet on almost every photograph we sense that this city was never finished, and what has been finished was later horribly disfigured, and that the new grew out of the ruins only in haste and in a slap-dash manner. And on nearly every picture we can also see that for decades, this city had no owner, noone to take care of her.
Budapest is like us, who were born here and live here, and will die here: left to fend for itself, incomplete, fatigue-ridden, yet determined to survive, to survive despite all odds, though the odds are countless without number...
It is a city of contrasts, a city of boths, a city of wounds.
It suits us to perfection.
Some men like young women, rosy-cheeked, innocent young girls with perfect figures, pure souls, ringing voices, who know nothing of the past, of passing, of sadness and death.
This, too, is desirable.
But we who live in this city prefer wisened older women who have been marred by time, who have a past, a history, and even a secret or two, who have many stories to tell yet remain stubbornly silent, but from this silence there bubbles forth, with a continual, ear-splitting shrill, a well of sadness.
This is our woman, this is our Budapest.