For Zoltán Jókay, people are the main thing, and emotion. In that they give back to us something of ourselves, in that they perhaps enable us to better understand and feel. His portraits are in a documentary tradition that knows where it comes from, which is also very familiar from August Sander to Diane Arbus, but which can only be achieve by realizing what he encounters in the other and us in the photo itself. This observation of “growing up” is not a notion relating to age but has more to do with a state of mind or a state of things that is never formal. Light and color are the very matter of these photographs that are always impossible to describe, that words fails to explain because they say more than words. The characters pose, assume their image as the photographer assumes his position. That is as respectful as it is modest. And of immense generosity.
Born in Germany in 1960 of Hungarian parents, Zoltán Jókay studied visual communication (photography), at the University of Essen, and graduated in 1993. In 1990, he received the contemporary German photography prize, and in 1994, the prize of Promotion of Arts of the city of Munich, followed in 1995 by the Aenne Biermann Prize of German Contemporary Photography, the Photography Promotion prize of the city of Munich in 1999, followed by many others. He currently lives and works in Munich.
Photo Phnom Penh festival
From December 8 – 13, 2012
Phnom Penh
Cambodia
