András Bán

...

Background, then, is a coherent, carefully thought-out and implemented project. Péter Szabó, now 37 and trained as an engineer, is an artist who does not look on the creative element alone as being part of the work but also on things that have customarily been considered a burden: he has mapped out, in both a conceptual and technical sense, how his ideas will reach the viewer, how he is going to display his work on a specific site and in other media. Most importantly, he wanted to show the chasms that can separate people even though they live in one country, speak the same language and draw on a shared set of symbols. The starting-point was thus his search for a dialogue with those who live on the fringes of society. His idea was to track down people who had never visited Budapest either because they had not been able to afford it or because the thought of being in a big city was daunting or because that's how things had turned out- whatever the reason. In villages on the borders of the country, he did indeed manage to find subjects who fitted the bill. He adopted a well-tried method that was used a century ago by travelling photographers: he toted around a backdrop that allowed his models to make believe they were fulfilling an unachievable dream or overcoming a longstanding fear. Whatever the case, cultural barriers were broken through.
Szabó carried out the project on his own except for the occasional helping hand of a local. In addition to the photographs, he also made videotapes in which the individuals who appear in the pictures say something about their world and their image of the capital in general, and the Chain Bridge in particular. These video narratives, too, open up a possibility of a dialogue, of understanding, by leading the viewer into personal worlds that are, each in its own way, whole and admirable. The photographs, on the other hand, point up their remoteness.
Besides portraying tensions that exist in society, Szabó's work-the series of photographs and the manner in which they were displayed-also touches on some quite basic issues concerning photography. By its very nature, photography is concerned with distance, with what separates and what connects over space and time; for precisely that reason, it is an accurate and profound metaphor for interrogating society. Twenty-five years ago, Benedict Anderson introduced his notion of the nation as an imagined community-imagined because the members of any given nation may not know everyone else, but still hold a conviction they are all living the same social reality and so are bound together by communal ties. With those enlarged photos on the Chain Bridge, Péter Szabó hoped to remind passers-by that right then, albeit anonymously and in another place, there were fellow countrymen with similar needs, desires, values and symbols; that the people appearing in the blown-up photographs belonged to the same community as the people viewing them. That was reason enough to take and present the photographs. But then they also pose questions for anyone who interprets them, forcing them to conclusions that touch on the reshaping of mundane reality, on the individual lives that are ensconced in them and on their intrinsic values.

András Bán
is a critic who has published widely on contemporary art. He lectures on visual anthropology at the University of Miskolc.