LTP (Estate), a series that has been in the making for years, explores the deeper strata of East European identity through the world of housing estates. The title refers to both some concrete physical space and a broader societal condition: the photographer interprets the world of prefabricated houses as an allegory of human fates.
The central idea of the series is that there is no such thing as an ‘average person’: every life is unique and complex. It defies the prejudiced notion that the grey uniform buildings are populated by grey uniform people, and sensitively portrays individual differences, offering distinctive character studies. As a symbol of modernization efforts by the socialist state, the housing estate is a well-known milieu for Hernád, in which individual stories overlap with the collective past. Built with Soviet and Danish technology, these concrete jungles have become familiar parts of our identity and visual environment.
The photographs of LTP are simultaneously personal and objective. Beauty and perfection are not concepts by which Hernád intends to judge value: it is authenticity, he thinks, that lends validity to an image. In this series, ordinariness becomes meaningful: the banal spaces, shabby objects and understated portraits reflect universal states of human existence.
By the same token, LTP is both a photographic project and an individual effort to talk about time, death and identity in the language of photography—in a setting where everyone can feel more or less at home.
To Géza Hernád (b. 1978), photography, which he taught himself and started to pursue in 1997, immediately seemed like a completely natural form of creative self-expression. Although music, film and visual art were also sources of inspiration, he soon realized that photography was both a technical challenge and an intellectual adventure. In 2001–2002, he took the National Association of Hungarian Journalists’ press photography course and went on to work for Hungarian and international periodicals and publishers for over two decades. His work has been repeatedly acknowledged, including with the Grand Prize of the Hungarian Press Photography Competition, a Pictures of the Year International award, and a dozen photography scholarships.
Katalin Kopin
curator
VERNISSAGE
INTERIOR IMAGES
