Hungary's government has banned people under 18 from visiting this year's World Press Photo exhibition in Budapest, after the far-right populist executive determined that some of its photos violate a controversial law restricting LGBTQ content.
The prestigious world photography exhibition, which is on display at the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest, receives more than 4 million visitors from all over the world every year. Featuring exceptional photojournalism, its mission is to provide visual coverage of a variety of important events to a global audience.
But a set of five photographs by Filipino photojournalist Hannah Reyes Morales led a far-right Hungarian lawmaker to file a complaint with the country's Ministry of Culture, which concluded that they violated a Hungarian law that prohibits the display of LGBTQ content to minors. Now, even with parental consent, minors under 18 years of age are no longer allowed to visit the exhibition.
The photographs, which document a community of LGBTQ seniors in the Philippines who have shared a home for decades and taken care of each other as they age, show some members of the community dressed as women and wearing makeup.
Joumana El Zein Khoury, executive director of World Press Photo, called it worrying that a series of photographs “that is so positive, so inclusive” has been attacked by the Hungarian government. It was the first time one of the exhibitions faced censorship in Europe, he said. "The fact that there's limited access for a certain type of audience is really something that hit us terribly," Khoury told The Associated Press. "It's mind-blowing that it's this specific image, this specific story, and it's mind-blowing that it's happening in Europe."
The move to ban young people from the exhibition was the latest by Hungary's government, led by nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, to restrict the availability of materials promoting (or depicting) homosexuality among minors in the media, including television, cinema, advertising and literature.
While the government insists that the 2021 “child protection” law is designed to insulate children from what it calls sexual propaganda, it has sparked legal action by 15 European Union countries, and the president of the Commission of the bloc, Ursula von der Leyen, described it as “a disgrace.”
Dora Duro, the far-right lawmaker who filed the complaint over the photographs, said she was outraged when she visited the exhibition and rejected claims that the government's decision limited freedom of the press or expression. "The biggest problem in the world," Duro told the AP. "What we see as normal, what we represent and what we transmit to (children) as valuable influences them, and this exposure is clearly harmful for minors and, I believe, for children and adults as well."
Reyes Morales, the photographer, said in an emailed statement that the subjects of her photographs serve as “icons and role models” for the LGBTQ community in the Philippines, and that they are “not dangerous or harmful.” "What is harmful is limiting the visibility of the LGBTQIA community and its right to exist and be seen," she wrote Reyes Morales.
"It makes me very sad that his story does not reach the people who need it most, it makes me sad that his story is being kept in the shadows."
Tamas Revesz, a former World Press Photo jury member who has been the organizer of the Hungarian exhibitions for more than three decades, said that many of the photographs in the exhibition — such as coverage of the war in Ukraine — are “a thousand times more serious and shocking” than Morales' series. But since about half of the roughly 50,000 people who visit the exhibition in Hungary each year are students, he said, thousands of young Hungarians will now not be able to see the World Press Photo collection, even those images that do not contain LGBTQ content.
“The goal of every image and every image report is to bring the news to us, the viewer, and many reporters risk their lives so that we have that knowledge,” Revesz said. "Everyone is free to think what they want about the images on display. These photographs were taken without prejudice, and we must also take what we see here without prejudice."
