Eszter Babarczy’s opening speech
In a world where everyone takes pictures all the time, to take photography seriously is like using a language in an extremely noisy environment. You need to focus more, both on forming the words and on listening to them. You also need to be sure that the other person is paying attention and that you are in a conversation and not simply bumping into each other in some random situation. So using photography in such a cacophonic space is all about meaning: offering up and focusing on meaning. It used the be a skillful art, to take a photograph, or perhaps even something like engineering, a very special expertise, but now we are so awash with images that are taken so lightly that simply taking a picture is not seen as a problem of expertise any more: it is a problem of relevance.
Relevance is the part of the meaning of your speech or any other form of communication that tells your interlocutor why he should be interested in your communiqué. It is a form of meaning that is interesting, attractive, useful or deep. That grabs us because we feel affected or involved. Why should I look at what you are offering up? Why should I use my scarce attentional resources to open up to your communication and try to understand what you are saying? Why should I spend minutes or even hours at this exhibition rather than scrolling on Instragram and taking in images in seconds or half-seconds?
Relevance in contemporary art photography is created by projects. You do not offer a single image, you offer a project. And it is not simply about visuals, or about the expertise of setting up a picture, picking a format and a camera, finding the good light, using the right software to process it. A project is something that is undertaken by a full human being, an artist as a person with goals, desires, fears and memories. A project is not about skills, it is about daring. Daring to be open, daring to ask questions, daring to face yourself, daring to meet difficult people at difficult times. The paradox of an art school is that this kind of daring is almost impossible to teach: you can encourage or steer students but you cannot implant daring into them.
The photo projects we see here today are also attempts at being daring, coming up with your own questions and your own answers. It is not surprising that four of the six exhibited today are investigating their own origins. It is often remarked that your first literary project is about who you are and where you come from. If this is true of literature, it is also true of photography. To be daring you have to face yourself, your origins, your unanswered questions about your family, the distance that might have grown between you and them.
Anna Gajewsky’s images show herself and her female family members in a Transylvanian village. These women look extremely powerful but also rather stoical. The men seem to be missing, only alluded to in a mixed media piece. This setup, powerful women and missing men, conjures up images of war and hardship and it is difficult not to feel affected by the quiet power of family. On the other hand, Hunor Tóth also documents a village in Romania but this project is very different: more conceptual, less documentary. He seems to focus on details or details of details, the universe of the photo book is half closed, unwilling to share too much information. It is not an accident that the human figures in these images are often without a face of even a head. They hide behind family pictures as if they wanted to say they are not individuals but members of a group, a lineage.
Elsa Berrien investigates her grandfather’s relationship with his birth country, Hungary. Hungary is a half understood network of places here, places with family members or with memories, and these are juxtaposed in the series of photo books that she created for this exhibition. In an almost shockingly ordinary picture we see the Danube from a Main kitchen: places are not embedded in their histories but are simply occasions of our memories and visits that can be cut up and mixed together.
Anna Pál documents her grandmother and the grandmother’s sister in their eighties, as they slowly approach the end of their lives. We meet them as individuals, in a home setting that reflects their personalities. Two nice elderly ladies who would be interesting to talk to. But step by step we see another story unfold: the physical decline of all human bodies, and the fact that at the end we are exposed, we must rely on other people and we are therefore very vulnerable.
Lilla Sipos also works with female vulnerability but her work is less personal and more surreal. She commemorates female saints of the Catholic Church who suffered martyrdom – using these figures as reminders that women are regularly hurt, beaten or killed by their male partners. Her decision to use hard-to-identify details of bodies makes these wounds viscerally immediate.
Finally, Domokos Varga sets up a grand conceptual project that could not be less personal: his Chaos and Order series confront us with rarely seen landscapes (he claims he was inspired by Arcadia pictures). To show what is rarely seen, and especially rarely enjoyed for its own sake as picturesque landscapes are, is a very political decision, in the sense of Jacques Ranciere. However, he creates beautiful images, as beautiful as any Arcadia from the seventeenth century. We are confronted with the beauty of uncanny places, and this makes us realize how little we actually see from the planet we live on.
These projects are very different and quite personal, however, what makes them art photography is the same thing that makes them projects: the scope of ambition. They are visual investigations of deep problems, and the investigative spirit demarcates these pictures from the dirty waves of visual clutter that is our everyday life. They ask questions about what photography can be, and how it can be used as a tool in an existential project of a human being who is confronted with the deep mysteries of origins, family, country and planet.