Dániel Halász has been returning to the same kind of place for years: Hungarian settlements with fewer than a hundred inhabitants. He has photographed more than eighty of them. The title says plainly what the book is about — falu is the Hungarian word for village — and that plainness is a clue to how the work behaves. This is not a survey made from a passing car but a long accumulation of repeat visits, by someone who knew such places first as a child during long stays in his grandparents’ village.
What he looks for there is not nostalgia. It is the practical intelligence of communities where little is available: repairs that hold, systems improvised from whatever is at hand, objects kept in use past their intended life. The photographs record work done by hand and maintained by habit, and the book treats that ingenuity as a subject in its own right rather than as picturesque hardship or as a story of loss.
Seventy-two colour photographs are interleaved with fragments of text: statistical data, conversations, remembered speech, literary excerpts. A loose inlay booklet, carrying a map of the villages visited, sits outside the main sequence. The design, made with Flóra Pálhegyi, holds these unlike materials in a single structure, so that a figure on the page can qualify an image and a remembered sentence can unsettle a statistic. That editorial decision is where the book’s argument actually lives.
For a collection, the interest is structural rather than speculative. Halász has published the book himself, which means the sequence, the mixing of documents and the booklet are his own decisions rather than a house style arrived at by committee; the result is a coherent authored object, not a portfolio between boards. As rural Europe is photographed with growing frequency, Falu holds its ground by refusing both elegy and uplift, and by insisting that resourcefulness be looked at closely and without condescension.
