Probably never before has so much been said about a contemporary Hungarian work of art as about Emese, the photograph by the photographic artist György Tóth. In the days following 10 November 2007, the title and the artist’s name even appeared on the front pages of the tabloid press, while in professional circles the work has since become both an example and a point of reference because of its high hammer price, and at the same time a promise that in contemporary Hungarian art artistic and commercial value, professional recognition and public success can indeed be reconciled. What happened on that notable day was that, at the auction of the Kieselbach Galéria és Aukciósház (Kieselbach Gallery and Auction House), bidding for the photograph ended at 1.8 million forints. Never before had such a sum been paid for a contemporary Hungarian photograph. Years prior to this event, one print of the work had already entered the collection of the Ludwig Múzeum – Kortárs Művészeti Múzeum (Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest), since it was already completed at the time when the museum organised the artist’s exhibition Test-tér (Body–Space) in 1995, yet Tóth did not include it in the show because he was dissatisfied with it, finding the shadow cast by the arm of the figure, seen in profile against the black background, too strong.
Emese – a work that has since appeared at almost all of his major exhibitions and has been reproduced alongside the many articles written about it – conveys just as convincingly as, for example, the complete visual material of Test-Tér, the album published by Pelikán Kiadó in 1995, that György Tóth had already created his own distinctive world by the mid-1990s. In his photographs made using multiple exposure, forms that overlap and interpenetrate as a result of subtle shifts appear, as a consequence of which photography seems, on the one hand, to turn into a work unfolding in time, into film, while on the other hand these shifts set in motion a chain of associations in the viewer, gradually redirecting attention from visible forms towards intellectual and emotional content, towards the personality appearing in the image, and more generally towards the evolving relationship between individual and environment, between human being and world. This is why traditional categories such as portrait and nude can be applied to his works only faute de mieux. While creating “nude photographs”, the eye, the gaze, and facial expressions hinting at the tremors of the soul often receive particular emphasis in his images (although he never psychologises), and while forming a portrait, the naked body frequently appears as part of the image of the face. For this reason, Katalin Néray’s definition, “body portraits”, is the most apt for his work – or, as László Beke put it of the photographs: “These are… simply these.”
The technical knowledge György Tóth had acquired alongside his amateur-photographer father was deepened decades later, after secondary school, when – having not been admitted to the Práter Street vocational school for photography – he worked as a trained assistant photographer in the Geodézia és Térképészeti Vállalat Síkfotó Geometriai Csoportja (Geodesy and Cartography Company, Planar Photographic Geometry Group), where he also gained a taste of the intricacies of press photography. At the end of the 1980s he became a photographer at Magyar Televízió (Hungarian Television), remaining there until the redundancies of 1999. In the early 1980s, the community represented by the Fiatalok Fotóművészeti Stúdiója (Studio of Young Photographers), founded in 1977, was of decisive importance to him; he became a member of the Studio in 1979.
The first body portraits were already made at the very beginning of the 1980s. Tóth’s four-image Aktfotó kísérlet (Nude Photography Experiment) convinces the viewer that absolute impersonality and detachment can also lend a peculiar tension to an image or series of images, if the photographer finds the model and the sequence of movements through which contents, life situations and conflicts can be suggested that cannot be articulated by other means. The body and the movement contain just as much as the face and the gaze – these images already make evident to the viewer Tóth’s conception of photography, which he subsequently confirmed through his entire later activity and which he expressed in words as follows: “The beauty of the female figure, the inscrutability of the female soul and their various manifestations are the means through which I can truly express what is inside me.” In the 1980s, friendships and human relationships fundamentally shaped the development of his personality and career. He formed a particularly close relationship with the architect Gábor Bachman, with whom György Tóth is linked by a highly significant joint undertaking: the exhibition Mű-Vészek (Art-tastrophes) [The Hungarian title is a wordplay that splits the word művészek (“artists”) into mű (“art”) and vészek (“perils”)], held in 1992 at the Dorottya Galéria (Dorottya Gallery), where, in a space installed by the architect, he presented twenty photographs, body portraits, as if they were photo-sculptures. The works carried a moral message: “It is the task of artists at all times to weigh, according to their own moral values, how much compromise has played a role in their activity.”
He also underscored his message with a self-portrait made in 1990, which alludes to the dramatically phrased truth that “black is not a colour but a way of life”, as Tóth put it at the time – something that is present everywhere, disappearing only for a moment when the flash fires. In this image, the concepts of space and time are peculiarly relativised; the work encompasses the corporeal and the spiritual, the present and that which can be evoked through imagination, the momentary and the infinite – all that has since remained the essence of Tóth’s art. By then he had already been concerned for years with the possibility of multiple exposure on a single negative. In seeking antecedents, we may go back even to his first images of hang-gliders, and in searching for external influences and sources of inspiration we need not look far: the problematics of multiple exposure and the interpenetration of spatial and temporal planes were very much “in the air” in Hungarian photography around 1980. While few at the time recalled the late-nineteenth-century works of Muybridge and Bertalan Székely depicting phases of movement in film-like image sequences, or Marey’s chronophotographs – which later exerted a strong influence on Futurist image-making techniques – many did remember that although these expressive possibilities were primarily exploited by cinema in the course of the twentieth century, the intention to transform the relationship of time and space also characterised the history of modern visual art throughout. It was present in the history of Hungarian photography as well, from Aladár Székely’s double-exposure portrait of Albert Apponyi, through István Kerny’s “trick photograph”, László Moholy-Nagy’s photograms, to András Baranyay’s multiple-exposure images. It was in fact Baranyay who, around 1970, once again drew attention to the expressive potential inherent in images photographed one upon another, whether accidentally or deliberately, and communicated something truly important to his contemporaries in a world that was essentially a period of concealment for all those who stood in opposition to the representatives of official art. Namely, that the more the creator hides something, conceals themselves in a multiple-exposure image, the more they come to the fore as an acting artist, since “the signature is the imprint of the psyche”. At the end of the 1970s, multiple-exposure photographs – primarily portraits, self-portraits and nudes – appeared again and again at the Dokumenta exhibitions in Veszprém organised by Antal Jokesz, or at various editions of the Esztergom Photographic Biennials.
What sets György Tóth’s works apart from these is, on the one hand, the consistency with which he strove to exploit technical possibilities to their maximum, and on the other hand the organic relationship that developed between technical and formal solutions and the image of the world formed within the artist when he definitively abandoned documentary photography. Instead of repeatedly returning to details of a reality long believed to be unchangeable – at least until the period of political transition – he prefers to blow its images apart. From the fragments he then attempts to reassemble them, or leaves it to the viewer’s imagination to attempt the impossible: to reconstruct the whole process from different phases of movement, to piece together totality from details. In one respect he goes beyond András Baranyay’s self-portraits: he does not speak of himself and his relationship to the world, but of the human being and the world in general. With the exception of a few portraits, the model appears against a dark background, emerges and disappears, doubles and multiplies, a translucent veil flutters before the body – every suggestion, every promise, and, from a male point of view, every longing. And everything speaks of that particularly intense relationship that comes into being between artist and model during the several hours of shared work. Alongside beautiful bodies he seeks beautiful eyes; often it is not the body but the gaze that delineates the space which is also the creator’s own field of movement. In most of the images the body appears against a uniform black background; at the meeting point of black and white exciting tonal gradations arise, and an intermediate space forms between model and environment. Within thirty seconds, with seven flashes, he exposes a single negative seven times.
Among the outstanding images of this period are the photographs of Yoko Ono, whose creation was made possible by the exhibition held in 1997 at the then newly opened Galéria 56 (Gallery 56). The gallery had been opened by Yoko Ono’s husband at the time, the interior designer and visual artist Sámuel Havadtőy, who had been living in the United States since 1971. When the couple arrived in Budapest, they sought professional assistance from Katalin Néray, through whom they also became acquainted with Tóth’s works at the NA-NE Galéria (NA-NE Gallery). This was followed by the solo exhibition at Galéria 56 (Gallery 56), after viewing which Yoko Ono asked the artist to make her portrait. Two images were created; in one, superimposed on Yoko’s face seen in profile, almost like a ghost image, the features of John Lennon appear with striking clarity. This could have become a worldwide sensation, if… Yoko left the next day, took the images with her, and they reportedly still hang in her New York apartment. Thanks to the art collector János Novomeszky (1955–2004), Tóth’s Önarckép (Self-Portrait) entered the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the portrait of Yoko Ono was acquired by the Library of Congress in Washington, and seven of his photographs became part of the collection of the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester. The imprint of these encounters is present in György Tóth’s art just as much as the influence of turns in his private life, expressions of everyday reality, or reverence for great predecessors. In 1992, one image from his work Képek Amerika felfedezésének ötszázadik évfordulójára I–III. (Images for the Five-Hundredth Anniversary of the Discovery of America I–III), depicting a woman biting into a bunch of grapes, was given the title Mapplethorpe emlékére (In Memory of Mapplethorpe). The dancing nudes of his five-image Salföld series from 1996, rendered in delicate grey tones, indirectly allude to the harmony that developed between human being and nature in the Balaton Uplands micro-world increasingly inhabited by artists. The following year he created a triptych entitled Édesanyám emlékére (In Memory of My Mother). His images appear in ever larger formats (at Galéria 56 he exhibited a single large-scale work), partly for this reason becoming increasingly “hard-hitting”, and partly because he presents the female body from ever more opposing perspectives within the body portrait, ever closer, ever more boldly. Set against the poetic vision of Lány virágcsokorral (Girl with a Bouquet) in 1995 is the mouth tearing at a chicken leg in Kentucky Queen I–II (1998), the mystery of Maszk (Mask), or the frightened gaze in the close-up facial depiction of Portré I–II (Portrait I–II). Opposed to Linda, which may be understood as the “female version” of the 1990 Önarckép (Self-Portrait), gazing inward towards the depths of the soul, stands the 1998 torso: the explicitly Courbet-referencing öl (lap), depicted from equally close range, clearly alluding to the famous and infamous L’Origine du Monde (The Origin of the World), which appears as the centre of a macrocosm concentrated in the blackness of the background by the density of its darkness.
By the mid-1990s symmetry already appears in some of György Tóth’s photographs as an organising principle (Macska (Cat), Pillangó (Butterfly), Maszk, Éva III), and symmetry also characterises the compositions of certain works in the 1999 series Lolita átalakulása (lit- Lolita’s Transformation). That same year saw the creation of Szimmetria kísérlet Lindával I–II. (Symmetry Experiment with Linda I–II.), the image pair rotated by forty-five degrees and exhibited on its point, followed the next year by further similar compositions (Dóra I–II.), as well as images in which the arrangement of the composition, the meeting of black and white, is determined by a diagonal. The body stretches across this diagonal or dissolves in the light appearing along it, thus connecting the realms of black and white, or indeed different picture planes, different dimensions of space and time (Csilla I–III., 1999; Fény I–II. (Light I–II.); Linda I–II., 1999/2000; I–II., 2000).
György Tóth already employed the large flash box during the making of the photographs listed above; its presence becomes of decisive importance in his works, diptychs and series after 2003, transforming the composition, as indicated by the differences between the 1999 Black and White image and the identically titled image pair from 2003. Through the use of the flash box, he is able, on the one hand, to confront black and white in a new way, and on the other hand to create new spatial relationships: the system of relations between the model and the surrounding space emerges in new dimensions. Placed behind the model, the flash box sometimes fills only a smaller part of the picture surface, sometimes almost the entire image, firing simultaneously with the flash illuminating the body from the front. The light coming from behind sometimes almost completely annihilates the figure, breaking it into pieces; yet if, during the pre-choreographed movement, the model “steps out” – more precisely, rises out of – the range of the flash box, then the formative power of the light coming from the front becomes stronger. The figure exists simultaneously in two different spaces – or is annihilated in the struggle between them. It is hardly accidental that with one of the most important series of this period, consisting of five images, Tóth György pays homage to Andrei Tarkovsky, the creator of the film Rubljov, who served as a guiding star throughout his career, reiterating what he has often said: “I learned how to cast a bell from him.” Kívülről befelé tekintve (Looking from the Outside In) – as the title of one of his 2005 triptychs reads. In the title of another, he poses the fundamental question that he has ultimately sought to answer in all his works: “Azt hiszitek, tudjátok, hogy mi a portré?” (Do You Think You Know What a Portrait Is?). The model standing on the axis of the image evokes rather the vulnerable, exposed human being than the beautiful woman, although it is precisely the acceptance of her vulnerability and exposure that constitutes the attraction of her personality, that truly makes her a woman. In the same way as the bound-arm, bandaged-head female figure of 1956/2006, through which Tóth was able to evoke the anonymous heroines of the most glorious days of twentieth-century Hungarian history, the 1956 Revolution, without singling them out from the others and without lifting them out of that world which repeatedly falls apart and is reassembled, and of which they form the centre.
[2014]