Attila Szabó is exhibiting sixty-four works, photographs and photo installations in the Kossuth street Gallery of the Szekler Museum of Ciuc. Nineteen large 60 x 90 cm works can be seen on the walls, while forty-two 30 x 30 cm photographs are displayed on the installations. The exhibited material is a selection of Attila Szabó's works from the last ten years.

The exhibition will be opened by Dr. Márton Szentpéteri, an historian of ideas from Budapest, on Friday 29 January at 5 pm, with a poetry recital by Enikő Szabó, an actor.

A creative vision

If David Hockney and Charles Falco are right, photography has been around since the 1920s. It is true that, at first, images were not captured by chemical means, much less digitally, using lenses and mirrors, but by hand drawing and painting. Those who dispute Hockney and Falco's thesis generally argue that their thesis, by which they claim to be friends of the famous British painter and physicist, belittles the extraordinary achievements of the great masters of old.

We already knew that Vermeer, Caravaggio and Canaletto used images projected by optical means as a starting point for their painting, but we never thought of them as mere fairground showmen. Well, why should we think so of their Renaissance predecessors, who similarly resorted to the use of optical aids? Just as the Baroque and Rococo painters did not slavishly copy reality in their paintings, so the Renaissance painters painted primarily what they thought they knew about the spectacle or what they wanted to express by invoking the spectacle. Their virtuosity, then, lies not in their technical prowess but in their power to create reality.

It is no different for the good photographer, however true it may be that we are now able to capture images projected with mirrors and lenses with unimaginable speed and precision on our digital devices. It makes a difference what we focus on and how we frame it. Just as we need a fine sense of how to choose landscapes, models and subjects, and how to adjust the light. Whether it's clouds ruffled by the breeze, old walls with crumbling plasterwork or velvety female nudes, to show in the world of his pictures why this earth is worth living in, the photographer needs the same in-depth contemplation and solid experience as his painter predecessors. I can confidently say that Attila Szabó's pictures are the fruit of such contemplation and experience.

Márton Szentpéteri