Photo exhibition "Belgrade Jazz Festival - Rewind" by László Dormán
From October 26 to December 4, 2022 // Belgrade Youth Centre hall
László Dormán covered 17 of the 20 first editions of the Newport Jazz Festival in Belgrade and the Belgrade jazz festival between 1971 and 1990. Thousands of black-and-white photos from his fascinating collection testify to the glorious history of the oldest Serbian jazz event. "Belgrade Jazz Festival - Rewind" is his second exhibition at the Festival since the first one, held back in 1989. The opening ceremony is set for October 26 at 18:00, before the start of the concert program of the 38th Belgrade Jazz Festival, scheduled for October 26 from 19:00 in the Belgrade Youth Centre Main Hall.
"The Belgrade Jazz Festival - Rewind exhibition presents only a fraction of László's huge photo collection: just to tickle your imagination, to picture all the wonders in thousands of photographs showing Belgrade jazz heroes, to hear jazz music while looking at the jazzmen. More than two hundred of his photos already adorned the Belgrade Jazz Festival 1971–2020 monograph, providing solid proof that all the things the eyewitnesses of the first Newports euphorically talked about really did happen. The joy of the musicians and the audience radiates from them as the strongest emotion in encountering dazzling music, especially jazz. They swing, groove, burst with energy and bathe in passion."
Vojislav Pantić, Belgrade Jazz Festival artistic director
László Dormán was born in 1944 in Stara Moravica, Bačka. He finished elementary school in Palić, attended high school and music school in Subotica, and completed his education at the Belgrade Academy of Music advanced department in Novi Sad. He played in the Philharmonic, big youth bands, Dixieland ensembles, and folk music orchestras.
He hosted jazz music shows on Radio Novi Sad since 1974 and was a member of the Novi Sad Days of the Jazz managing board. For almost twenty years, he was a photojournalist and journalist for the Novi Sad youth weekly in the Hungarian language "Képes Ifjúság". From 1988, he was the editor and host of night shows on Radio Novi Sad in Hungarian. In Hungary, where he lived from 1993 until 2011, he worked as an editor on Hungarian Radio programs.
As the photojournalist of the youth weekly, he photographed: politicians, various political events, youth work actions, May 25 celebrations, landscapes, portraits of artists, writers, poets, painters, and musicians, as well as social photography. However, during his career, he liked most to cover jazz festivals, and he recorded the Belgrade Jazz Festival from its beginning in 1971 as the Newport Jazz Festival until its break in 1990.
He had many solo exhibitions across the former Yugoslavia and Hungary, as well as in other European countries, and received several significant awards at collective exhibitions. When it comes to jazz photography, he won: First prize at the "Man and Music" exhibition in 1984 in Negotin; the "Golden Form" award for a collection of jazz photographs, at the exhibition of UPIDIV (Association of Applied Artists and Designers of Vojvodina) in 1986 in Novi Sad; Gold plaques for the collection of color slides on the theme of jazz, at the "Golden Eye" exhibition in 1986 in Novi Sad; Silver plaques on the subject of music and dance, for the photography of Art Blakey, at the FIAP (International Federation of Photographic Art) International Photo Salon in 1989 in Burghausen (Germany).
Exhibition supported by Collegium Hungaricum in Belgrade.
