Sándor Szilágyi: On Photography

Thematic Thread:
On Photography

Sándor Szilágyi

Sándor Szilágyi is a Hungarian media theorist, writer on photography, living in Budapest, Hungary. His interest range from Hungarian art photography, documentarist photography, and the theoretical questions of photography.

Let us begin at the beginning: what is photography? Not as a form of art, but photography in general. Photography could be defined as a form of human communication through which a wave motion is fixed as a still picture on a carrier by optical and chemical means. This wave motion is mainly light …

Around the time of the First World War, the Photo-Secession with its principles of beauty and idealized aestheticism no longer fit the spirit of the time. Instead, Modernist efforts introduced new ways of seeing into the fine arts …

Hungary is a small country, but a great power in terms of photographers: the names of Kertész, Brassaï, Moholy-Nagy, György Kepes, Robert Capa, Stefan Lorant, Martin Munkacsi, Lucien Hervé and a good few other Hungarians could not be omitted from a history ….

Gábor Kerekes does an extraordinary thing with photography. He does not tell stories or cite dramatic events, nor does he document his own emotions and moods – he philosophizes. He makes ontological and epistemological investigations; he probes the bounds of human cognition.

… for Ózd’s men and women, as well as for millions of Hungarians and other central-eastern Europeans, democracy proved costlier than they might have imagined.