PART TWO

„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.

Anna got pregnant with 17. She is the daughter of my wife’s sister.
I wanted to document how she was turning from a girl into a woman; I wanted to photograph her changing from a kid to grown up.

Time is changing us slowly, hardly detectable, but once in a while you realize, that you are not that young anymore, and then you detect that you are not young at all, then you turn middle aged just to become old.

This passing of time I wanted to record in the time-lapse mood. I wanted to outwit time.

Wrong concept, and friendly images for my family album.

I was invited to take part in a group exhibition in Bamako (Mali), representing a section of German contemporary photography and made these portraits during the two weeks I stayed there . They are as beautiful as the people I have met there, and I like the images as images.

But I want more from photography than beautiful photographs of people whose culture is completely alien to me.

Growing up is a movement in time,
directed by something one may call fate.

To be a grown-up is a state of mind and not a condition of age.

To encounter life, the best thing to do, I thought, was encountering people.

Friends and loved ones are the only remedy for all the hardships that inherently belong to life.

Only when habitus and some emotion mirrored in the face of the people I met on the streets had punctured my fear, I did overcome my inhibitions to establish contact and to take some photographs.

1989, directly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I started travelling to Eastern Germany, soon to become part of the country I was born to. All I had with me was a sleeping bag and my camera. I slept at odd places, got up early because of the morning cold, and tried to capture what I saw, because I knew, it would be gone soon.

As so often, my intuitive reactions were stronger than the concept I had in mind.
Instead of photographing that what was and soon wouldn´t be anymore, I made portraits of children that reflected a part of me and my childhood that I by then had put firmly aside.

My photographs were reminiscent of a time that was yesteryear already in the moment I took them.
I didn´t photograph the present; I photographed my past, as it might have been. I photographed in a country that was closer in look and feel to my Hungarians roots than the country I was born in, the country that I had been growing up.

Four pages, a tiny fragment of all the notebooks I made while studying photography. With the help of these notebooks I was searching for a photographic language and dealing, visually, emotionally and intellectually with my present and that what has happened a long time ago.

This is a sequence about the fundamentals of photography, and a sequence about a basic problem of communication. A sequence about an idea easy to think, difficult to grasp and hard to live.