// Behind the scenes. A photo and the story behind it!

Hello, photography lovers and survivors of cultural shock! Something genuinely special happened to us this week: we joined the CH100 Lost & Found city walk organised by Collegium Hungaricum and Kulturschock Wien. And this was one of those occasions when we truly stepped outside our comfortable little bubble.

It seems summer didn't knock this year—it kicked the door in. And with it began the family-friendly, mind-expanding edition of our photo club. Over the next two months, we're not only hunting down Vienna's most photogenic corners; we're venturing straight into the maze of our own minds to catch that inner voice that usually waits until we're asleep before saying anything useful. This Tuesday, Hundertwasser House became the setting for our psycho-photographic experiment.

Summer is beginning, and we immediately jumped in at the deep end—photographically speaking. Our first victim, or rather source of inspiration, was Vienna's Alt-Erlaa: once imagined as a kind of social-housing utopia and today an enormous concrete landscape where, by reputation, people actually quite like living. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. First, what exactly did we get up to there? A warning: Alt-Erlaa is not a typical tourist attraction.

Picture this: a rainy, grey Tuesday in Vienna. Instead of drinking hot chocolate in a cosy café, we threw ourselves into the mysterious halls of the MAK Museum of Applied Arts. Yes, a museum. Even I found the idea slightly unusual at first, but in the name of team building and actually getting to know one another, we are apparently capable of anything—including cultural shock.

Don't you hate it when Tuesday's calendar says “creative outdoor photography” and the weather forecast stares back at you with one stubborn word: RAIN? That's exactly the loop I had been stuck in. Tuesday arrives. It pours. Fine, nature needs water, we need water—but what happens to our photography-and-meet-people evening when the heavens have apparently formed an alliance against us? A panic attack was approaching. Then Denisz appeared with the rescue plan: IKONO Vienna.

After last week's museum adventure—which gave us roughly as much inspiration as an entire season of reality TV—we took over Vienna's Haus der Musik. More than twenty enthusiastic, mildly caffeine-dependent people gathered, and almost everyone had already survived at least one of our slightly mad photography expeditions. So by the time we entered the museum, we already had a routine. Military precision? Well... perhaps more of a cheerful single-file line. But enthusiasm count

We have to admit there was a certain amount of recklessness involved when, a week in advance and right in the middle of wildly changeable summer weather, we pointed at Vienna's Prater on the map and said: that's where we're going. The universe apparently rewarded our courage—or perhaps our magic simply worked—because, as the photographs and videos prove, we ended up with magnificent weather. Of course, we didn't leave everything to chance.

We have this regular Tuesday-evening thing here in Vienna. You know the kind: a group of creative art lovers gets together to recharge, meet people and step out of the everyday hamster wheel for a while. Usually we laugh, swap stories and create things together, but this week I decided to throw everyone straight in at the deep end. The theme: studio model photography. The twist?

“Fotózz Haver!” was a hit in Budapest once again—and the funny moments were very much part of the package. This was our second time shaking up the HaverVagy community in Budapest. About a month earlier, more than forty of us had met above the tunnel by the Buda end of Chain Bridge. This time Fisherman's Bastion became our playground. Nearly fifty brave photo hunters turned up: eleven “old hands” (our Firsts) and thirty-six newcomers who still had no idea what they were getti

Well, the final big adventure of August certainly wasn't a quiet one. We said goodbye to the month by storming the stronghold of Surrealism and heading straight into the twists and turns of Salvador Dalí's mind—right here in Vienna. This was our fourth cultural meet-and-create adventure, practically a tradition by now, and the atmosphere could have made even the master's moustache jealous. But who exactly was Dalí, beyond being a Spanish gentleman with facial hair that could

Imagine this: the French photographer Cartier-Bresson—who lived in New York for a while but always considered Paris his true home, and who has been called the Picasso of photography—didn't openly credit many people as inspirations. BUT two Hungarians mattered enormously: Martin Munkácsi and André Kertész. Munkácsi's famous photograph of boys running into the surf struck him so powerfully that, by Cartier-Bresson's own account, it helped ignite his passion for photography.