Gyula Sopronyi: Floating Aspect

With the professional cooperation of the Capa Center Gyula Sopronyi's exhibition Floating Aspect opened on September 30 as part of FotoIstanbul Festival. Balogh Rudolf Award-winning photographer Gyula Sopronyi’s series of photographs entitled Floating Aspect, which he made through the National Cultural Fund of Hungary’s André Kertész Fellowship in Paris, was shown to the Hungarian public at the Project Room of the Capa Center.

We are exploring photographer Gyula Sopronyi’s viewpoint. As we are looking at the pictures, we are trying to place ourselves both into the position and the situation at the same time. The image crops are quite narrow, and yet they are large enough to show and let us see the situation and the environment. A floating aspect.

Roland Barthes referred to the viewing of photographs with a general interest as studium. “…[it] doesn’t mean, at least not immediately, “study,” but application to a thing, taste for someone, a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment, of course, but without special acuity” (Barthes 26). However, there is something that breaks this kind of investigation and it is the punctum. “A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)” (Barthes 27). As long as we are looking at Sopronyi’s abstract series with “only” that general interest of putting ourselves into the photographer’s position (on the Pont des Arts bridge in Paris), looking for his viewpoint (he is looking downwards), and finding what he is looking at (the barges) – we are only engaging in studium. Attention is required here to find the punctum. The punctum of the photographs may be different for everyone: the cargo of the boats – a blue piece of clothing in the gravel, a little dog in the clothes basket, a nicely laid table, the construction debris or the strings tangled on the boat canvas. And the punctum may be the rippling waves, the infinite shades of the river’s blue and green, which do not only allow us to draw conclusions about the circumstances and the weather conditions of the shot, but they are also important factors which influence the mood.

Backing away from the individual visual elements and details, however, their conflicting and contrapuntal relationship becomes important: the water with the floating and moving boats; the barges with their cargo inside or upon them; the movement with the immobility of the photographer, as well as the interrelationship of each image within the series.

– Judit Gellér

Photo: Gyula Sopronyi: Callsign FM3493, 2014.

Location
FotoIstanbul Festival
Beşiktaş – Çarşı, Istanbul, Turkey

The exhibition is open to the public free of charge:
September 30 – October 22, 2017