« Le temps d’une image » — Rencontre avec Phil Casoar, journaliste et auteur

Maison Européenne de la Photographie

The MEP continues its new cycle of encounters « Le temps d'une image », proposed every first Thursday of the month. Hosted by journalist Arnaud Laporte, this event invites a personality to choose an image that accompanies them, troubles them, or nourishes their imagination, and to unfold its multiple resonances over the course of a forty-five-minute conversation. For this second encounter, the guest Phil Casoar, journalist and author, has chosen a photograph that has become one of the emblematic images of the Hungarian revolution of 1956. A famous shot published in Paris Match, depicting a young couple of insurgents in the streets of Budapest, whose identity, fate, and even the circumstances of the shot remained mysterious for a long time. This image, Phil Casoar placed at the heart of an investigation conducted over several years with the historian Eszter Balazs, which gave rise to the book Les Héros de Budapest, published by éditions Les Arènes in 2006. Re-published this autumn 2026 by éditions La Table Ronde in an enriched edition, titled Budapest 56 : L'envers d'une photo, the work retraces the two authors' quest to find the protagonists of this photograph, which has become an icon of photojournalism and of the Hungarian uprising of 1956. Phil Casoar has long been interested in images, in how they are made and the stories they may conceal. With Arnaud Laporte, he will look back at this photograph that has become legendary: how does an image enter history? What remains behind an icon? And what can a photograph still reveal when one sets out to find its characters and its context again? An encounter around an image, but also around the investigation that allows its history and its faces to be restored to it. The encounter will be followed by a discussion with the audience, then, at 8pm, by a signing session at the MEP bookshop.

Source: Paris Open Data ↗