Fortepan is an online archive of found and donated photographs. The archive is based in the former Forte photo-chemical factory in Vac, Hungary. The factory gave Fortepan its name.
Ákos Szepessy, Miklós Tamási and their friends began collecting discarded photographs in the 1980s. These were mainly negatives. In 2015, a fire damaged and destroyed many of these negatives. With the help of the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, all of the remaining negatives and photographs were digitised and uploaded to an online site. As of August 2020, there were 140,000 images from 1900-1990 in the archive.
The large majority of the photographers are unknown, likewise their subjects.
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