Sylvia Plachy: When Will It Be Tomorrow
Open to the public:
2022. 10. 20. – 2023. 01. 08.
Location: Radvila Palace Museum of Art, 24 Vilniaus st, LT-01402, Vilnius, Lithuania
Curator: Gabriella Csizek
When Sylvia photographs, she is immersed like a child. Her pictures, no matter where they have been taken, open a path to our own dreams and memories.
The photographs in the exhibition When Will It Be Tomorrow have been selected from the entire oeuvre. The selection and arrangement are more akin to poetry, and neither the locations nor the themes were a primary consideration. The series of images induced by associations, feelings and meanings lead us down paths of emotion and inspire new thoughts.
Sylvia Plachy was born at a time when Europe was in flames, and for many, even hope was just a dream. She spent the first years of her childhood in this apocalyptic world, and then, at the age of thirteen, her everyday life was replaced by the Unknown: flight and the arrival in a new world where she doesn’t speak the language, where everything needs to be started all over again. Where, beyond the love of her parents, the inner images and memories she brought with herself are the source of security.
The calling she found later on, photography, gave her the opportunity to tell stories via her images. Her humanism permeates everything she does. She incessantly travels the world, creating her photographs instinctively, following her own image-creating rules, but transgressing even those when necessary. She provides the moment with substance, admits us into the story, represents fate, and manifests the soul, even though she is given only a fraction of a moment.
Gabriella Csizek – Curator of the exhibition
Sylvia Plachy’s Bio
Sylvia Plachy was born in Budapest during World War II. Fleeing Hungary with her parents after the 1956 Revolution, she has been living in New York for most of her adult life. An award-winning photographer, her photographs are in many private collections and museums, such as the MoMA in New York City, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the High Museum of Atlanta and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. She is known in New York City for her 30 years tenure as staff photographer for the Village Voice. Her weekly column, UNGUIDED TOUR became the title of her first book, which won ICP’s Infinity Award in 1990. Her other awards include the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, a CAPS grant, the Dr.-Erich-Salomon-Preis for lifetime achievement in photojournalism, and the Lucie Award.
She has had one-woman shows at the Whitney Museum at Phillip Morris, the Queens Museum, the Boca Raton Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and at galleries in Berlin, Paris, Budapest, Manchester, Atlanta, Ljubljana, Tokyo, Cluj-Napoca, Charlottesville, Los Angeles and New York City.
Books: Unguided Tour, Red Light, Out of the Corner of My Eye, Goings on About Town, Signs & Relics and Self Portrait with Cows Going Home.
She has had features and photo essays published in magazines and newspapersaround the world including Vogue, The New York Times, Metropolis Magazine and The New Yorker.
Sylvia is married to retired history teacher, Elliot Brody, and is the mother of actor, Adrien Brody.
Excerpt from Kronos and Kairos, wall text by Peter Róna, Fellow. Black Friar’s Hall Oxford University
“Sylvia’s photography can be read as a rebellion against the tyranny of sequential time. It is a heroic struggle to recapture the enchantment of direct, unmediated experience, where the experience is not the witnessing of an event, but the enchantment that is born from that direct connection between the photographer and what she sees. In the best of her work the subject is unaware that the photograph is being taken; there is no gaze, no posing, no premeditated composing. The subject of these pictures – as so often in great painting – is not the recording of what is seen, not even the photographer’s experience of it, but that magical connection between the photographer and her object. They are unscheduled encounters where truth is viscerally sensed even before its meaning is discerned. Indeed, it is that moment, before the birth of its meaning, before its arrival to its settled place in our consciousness, that places these pictures outside of time. These pictures, exuding warmth, immediacy and charm, are in fact deeply subversive of the instrumental rationality of our times. They speak of profound and unconditional love.”