The project “Streets of Debrecen” is about capturing the streets of the city in a unique way. It was inspired by the research done by biologist and founder of the project Viktor Löki.
As a biologist, Viktor studied cemetery wildlife, primarily wild orchids, and other endangered plant species. Viktor has visited more than 12 countries in the last six years with this purpose, but he has obviously not been able to go to every cemetery in every country. He wondered about those areas he had missed. He decided to make sure he wouldn’t miss them in the future.
Since Viktor lived in Debrecen, he decided to go street by street and take a picture of every street, so by the end of the project he would have a picture of every street in Debrecen. Whether it was a picture of the entirety or just a small part of it, doesn’t matter. The point is to take a picture of that street and be able to assign a coordinate to it, as shown below, he frequently posts them to Facebook.
Debrecen currently has 1821 streets and according to Viktor, he has already managed to photograph 950. He keeps track of where he has been and where he needs to go, via a database that is based on a database of local historian László Balogh.
In addition, his work also takes into account the fact that streets are constantly being created, so his database is constantly expanding. It is not impossible that within two years there will be two thousand streets in the city!
He usually plans in advance where he is going, but sometimes the destination is not a fixed destination, even ten minutes before departure. He goes out to survey streets, specific locations once or twice a week, but he often returns to the same place several times. He always tries to photograph something with a little hidden curiosity, a special house, a resident of the street, and so on.
Once he has photographed all the streets of Debrecen, he would like to photograph the surrounding settlements in the Hungarian countryside where many interesting things can be found.
For those interested in seeing his photos, you can find some on Facebook or on Instagram.
