zoltán jókay

work in progress
supported through a scholarship by the Stiftung Kunstfonds, Bonn, Germany 2011

This project has received the
International Photography Award – EMERGENTES DST – BRAGA (PT), 2011

Since I have left parental home I have held all kinds of odd jobs to support my photographic work and myself. The last years I had worked as unskilled social worker in a low-income quarter, until my job was cut as useless and I was fired. Since then I am working with demented elderly people in a senior home.

Working in the quarter I was confronted with helplessness, poverty, affliction, craze, sadness and uttermost loneliness. I couldn’t imagine that anything could be worse than this.

Living in an average senior home is worse.

Shortly after I had lost my work I started to photograph the people I have got to know in the quarter, subsequently I also picked up to photograph the people I am caring for in the senior home.

The intensity of this almost inevitable part of the “conditio humana” is hardly to be met by the transfer into the speechless abstraction of photography.

Still, it´s worth a try.

„Artist in residency“ in La Paz, Bolivia
grant by the Goethe-Institut

I decided to work here on a project under the following preliminaries:

No portraits of people I don´t have a common language with, no portraits of people whose culture and living conditions I neither know nor understand.

No images of the colorful and exotic.

After I came back from Bolivia, I printed the wrong images, was dissatisfied with my work, and stored the material away.

Now, two years later, I have found a thread worth showing.

2004, after having published my monograph, I tried to get rid of my photographic identity. The following years I successively produced bodies of work that either turned out to be complete failures or, even when succeeding to set a visual mark, didn´t hold enough meaning for me.

Though Germany is my native country, I am still not used to it´s cityscapes full off everyday ugliness and strange absurdities.

These three images mark an effort of two years, they are placeholders for a project that proved to be a dead-end street.