“The 110 images from Budapest-born photographer Sylvia Plachy‘s exhibition, When Will It Be Tomorrow at the Hungarian Photographer’s House in Budapest, are selected from her entire oeuvre with neither the places they were taken at, nor their theme playing a role in their inclusion, they are chosen as if attracted by the title’s question.” Gabriella Csizek, the curator of the exhibition writes, “The installation adheres to a logic of poetry. The individual walls are verses, bringing the halls and the exhibition together into a poem, a series of poems. The sequences of images created through associations, emotions, and meanings are sometimes painful and eternally lonely. Still at times, they put a smile on our faces.”
“Sylvia Plachy’s humanism and commitment to truth,” continues Ms. Csizek in her introduction to the show, “are not in the harmonious presentation of the world or in search of its beauty; instead, she makes us see the back story with an almost imperceptible subtlety. She sees the fallibility of human existence and reveals cracks and layers of fragility in the faces or course of events. She senses the moment and converts this feeling into an image mapped onto light-sensitive paper. She often conceals her portraits, almost displaying them as quasi-still lifes. Her subjects are never beautiful or ugly; they are people who are just who they have become and who they could be. Sylvia holds a soul-mirror in the form of a camera in her hand. All of her images are a piece of fiction, yet genuinely real at the same time. She never finishes a story but shows it, thus giving life to the image.”
“Not since Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’ have I experienced a body of work of such range and power. She makes me laugh and she breaks my heart. She is moral. She is everything a photographer should be.”–Richard Avedon
In 1956, after the Hungarian revolution, Plachy crossed the Austrian border with her parents. Part of the way they were hidden by corn in a horse-drawn farm cart. Two years later the family settled in the New York area, where she has been living with her family since then. She took her first photographs in the Austrian Alps at the age of 15 during a school trip with an Agfa Box camera a gift from her father.
For thirty years, since 1974, Plachy was an influential staff photographer for the Village Voice, a cultural weekly newspaper in New York. Her photography work has been accompanied by continuous success and recognition. In 1977, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2004, the WIPI (Women in Photography International) gave her a Lucie Award. In 2010, she was given the Dr. Erich Salomon award by the German Society for Photography (DGPh) for her lifetime achievement in photojournalism. She has six published photography books and is now a contributing photographer for The New Yorker.
The title of this exhibition, When Will It Be Tomorrow, is a sentence from her childhood she used to ask before going to bed.
EXHIBITION
When Will It Be Tomorrow
By Sylvia Plachy
From February 15 to April 19, 2015
Hungarian Photographer’s House / Mai Manó Haz
1065 Budapest-Terézváros, Nagymezõ utca 20
Hungary
