Virág Böröczfy

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Photography of Lenke Szilágyi

 

Lenke Szilágyi earns her living as a much sought-after photographer of actors of stage and screen. Photography, but of a very different kind, is also what one might call her hobby. For decades now she has been uncompromising in her pursuit of an approach for which she is held to be one of the best of her generation. The nom de plume of 'Single Lens' that she hit upon and made use of for a while in the early 1980s, at the start of her career, defines her relationship to photography, an activity which is not some sort of privileged moment or special act, but part of her ordinary everydays. It is a way of life that is free of any playing of roles or taking up postures—simply her most important means of communication with the world. That might explain why her pictures are so hard to pigeonhole, resisting any classification based on genre, subject or photographic technique.
In producing her pictures Szilágyi does not follow any rule, and she does not do anything much in order for them to bear the signs of some distinctive style. Wherever she happens to be, that's where she starts to take pictures in whatever way she pleases, whether it is a matter of her own circle of friends or members of the Hungarian intellectual elite, of whom she has amassed a long series of brilliant portraits, or of snow-covered rooftops or the world of wild weekend parties. She will sometimes take straight photos, but at other times she will place the emphasis on certain parts or people; she may snatch moments or she may pose and construct. And these might all be with a single set of material, seemingly arbitrarily. Then again, she often tries out new strategies, drops an old one and later returns to it, and all in her own fairly self-determining manner.
The starting-point of her art is the world in which she lives, what might be called reality. What she creates out of that is her own personal reality. In one way she documents but also creates reality, which, through strength of personality, then seems more real than the "original". At once fiction and document, maybe that is why many find it so hard to grasp what she aims at, because in point of fact it is a matter of unifying two antithetical and, in principle, mutually exclusive concepts. Indeed, there is no good term that could be applied as a general epithet to designate this creative approach. Of the definitions that critics have offered, the one that strikes me as closest to the mark is that of subjective or lyrical documentarism.
Szilágyi selects a particular frame, or some combination of motifs or elements; to put it another way, the view generates a kind of vision or apparition whereby she tries to define and document her own place in the world. What, then, the pictures that she selects are? Typically, they are of the sort of things that anyone else would probably not even notice, but if they did see them and if they considered themselves to be the self-respecting kind of photographer, they would almost certainly not choose to photograph them, or if they did, they would not show them to one and all. In general, they are totally inconsequential settings: people are seated or standing somewhere, alone or in groups, or else they are animals or views of surroundings just so, in themselves. There is nothing of interest going on; the participants are just there. In one interview Lenke Szilágyi said she was interested in moments "where time takes a rest and spreads itself out, adopts another dimension, settles." Time passes, and in such pictures we viewers can catch a glimpse of a slice of eternity.
A majority of the images Szilágyi picks make such minimal demands that this in itself is problematic. They are out of focus; the shot was taken against the light or with backlighting; certain details, such as parts of the body that seem to be important to a finished portrait are simply cut off; a face is not visible; the picture is overexposed, and so on. These apparent "goof-ups", however, underline even more strongly the sense of real life, or the strangeness and absurdity of the world that is transmitted by the pictures. As a result, their meaning is never unambiguous but rather mysterious; every shot encompasses an entire repository of interpretations. It is as if someone were only capable of making sense of the world through pictures, and at the cost of major exertions. In her own visual diary, Lenke Szilágyi tries to look on the place where she lives, her own life, as being a liveable, a true home. She does not rebel; she views the world's disintegration with quiet melancholy.
For a long time she worked solely with the techniques of black-and-white photography, developing the pictures herself. A strong element of her pictorial poetry was the characteristically grey brilliance that was embodied in her wide- ranging use of soot blacks emerging out of a world of soft grey tones. For choice she would show these pictures in photo albums that she herself had assembled. The three books of her work that have been published to date are Fotóbrancs (Photo Team) of 1994, Látókép megállóhely (Látókép Stoppingplace) of 2000, and Fényképmoly (Photograph Bug), which was brought out in conjunction with a big retrospective.
The all-engulfing orgy of images and colour of the digital age finally caught up with even the likes of Lenke Szilágyi. More recently she has been taking mainly digital photographs, which she often juggles with subsequently. This first became evident to the wider public in a show entitled "Parties" that was part of the 2006 Photo Month in Budapest. The subjects of the photographs are the leisure pursuits of the young: the intentionally manipulated gratification of their pleasures as consumers in their places of amusement, a world that parades its hypocrisies. In these photographs, over and beyond the visual treats, it is possible to sense the delirious lights, the ear-splitting music and visceral thrill, the foetal state of release in the quest for joy and a delirium of pleasures. Apart from the "spied" moments of the "party" world, her portraits show the other side of that unbridled fervour: burning out, disillusionment, the melancholy of loneliness. Possibly the most emblematic of the pictures in the series are those of cinetrip parties in swimming pools, with the boundaries of naked bodies dissolving in orgies of light, the multitude of human beings becoming one organic mass. Instead of a delirium of joy, though, one has the feeling that it is something more like the inhuman world of refugee camps that is being laid out for inspection and is treated by us with Szilágyi's quiet, resigned empathy.
The most recent colour pictures were taken on journeys, on trips into the countryside. Whether these are near at hand or more remote areas, at all events for many people they represent attractive, one might even say "idyllic" spots. We have a chance to observe the people who live there, the objects around them—maybe we manage to glimpse a bit of the sunnier side of life. Yet, however green the grass, however dazzlingly blue the blues, we always end up being by ourselves, Szilágyi quietly avers.
What links the new pictures and the old is no less than her own sensitive and seemingly innocent gaze, a touching aspect of which is Szilágyi's continued ability to marvel at the world. The look is childishly frank, drawing in the world, imbibing it, unable to get enough of it, and her pictures thereby create it anew.

 

Virág Böröczfy,
an art historian, is currently on the staff of the Fotografus.hu Foundation for Hungarian
Photography. She is the editor of the Fotopost.hu online magazine of photographic art.