Photography – light-writing – could there be a more Greek word? Jacques Derrida poses this question in his text On the Photographs of Jean-François Bonhomme. (Derrida 2009, 25)
Philosophy – the love of wisdom – could there be a more Greek word? We might ask the same question while reading Derrida’s text, in which photography encounters poetry and philosophy – light-writing meets text-writing and the love of wisdom.
“For this is what happened,” Derrida quotes Socrates as saying in Plato’s Phaedo: “the same dream often came to me in the course of my past life, appearing now in one guise, now in another, but always saying the same thing: ‘Socrates,’ it said, ‘practise the art of the Muses and work at it.’ Until now I had understood it as urging and encouraging me to continue doing what I was already doing: just as runners are urged on, so my dream was urging me to do what I was already doing – to practise the art of the Muses, since philosophy is the greatest of the arts of the Muses, and that was what I practised.”
(Phaedo, 61a) (Derrida 2009, 50)
Τέχνη μουσική (technē mousikē) – this is the expression used in the Greek original, which Grácia Kerényi renders in Hungarian as “of the Muses”, while the French translation quoted by Derrida renders it as “musical”. But whether we translate it as “the art of the Muses” or as “musical activity”, this activity can be discerned in the composition of poetry, images and philosophical argument. The Muses provide inspiration; writing poetry, composing music, creating images and practising philosophy require craftsmanship of the highest order.
The photographic work of Sándor Apáti-Tóth is an art of the Muses in the highest sense – the art of the lived moment. The moment in which objects shed their superfluous details and, in their simplicity and singularity, reveal their inner force. The moment in which the ground opens beneath our feet, “time is out of joint”, and through the veil of space-time we glimpse the dizzying depths and incomprehensible heights of existence.
Conceptual Photographic Art – Sándor Apáti-Tóth’s Ars Poetica
Sándor Apáti-Tóth is a photographus doctus. He knows everything there is to know about photography; he has complete mastery of the photographer’s craft; every one of his exhibitions is an artistic credo – an ars photographica. Etűdök, jelek, emlékek (Etudes, Signs, Memories, 1985), Talált képek (Found Pictures, 1988), Ecce homo (Ecce Homo, 1992), Csöndek (Silences, 2000, 2008), Atlantisz (Atlantis, 2015), Alma és fája (The Apple and Its Tree, 2023), Az idő kapujában (At the Gate of Time, 2024), Háborúk árnyékában (In the Shadow of Wars, 2025), Palackposta (Message in a Bottle, 2026) – exhibition after exhibition, photographic album after photographic album, all bearing witness to the fact that for him photography is a way of life. Fate itself offered him this way of life: he was born into a family of photographers, began taking photographs at the age of six, first exhibited in a national exhibition at thirteen, and had barely turned eighteen when his photographs appeared in exhibition spaces in Tokyo, Brussels, Paris, Bordeaux and London.
He chose this way of life when, at the age of twenty, he decided to become a “freelance photographer”. Since then, he has had more than ninety solo exhibitions; as a photojournalist, he has had nearly ten thousand press photographs published; he worked as a picture editor for the journal Tekintet, designed book covers, posters and brochures, produced ethnographic photographic series, headed Cegléd City Television from 1991 to 1995, and later founded a printing house. Yet whatever he turned his hand to, all his activities revolved around the image.
Driven by his commitment to photographic art, he consciously and systematically mapped out the creative trajectory he would follow from the age of twenty to sixty. This period began with the photograph Csönd (Silence) and concluded with the exhibition Silences at the Hungarian National Gallery in 2008. Three themes preoccupied him during these years: preserving the “vanished, pure and austere world” of his grandparents; the “three fundamental experiences” of love, birth and passing away; and the fate of a Europe “infected” by dictatorships (A.T.S. 2008).
Three thematic fields, three headings, three cycles – Silences, Jelek (Signs), Emlékek (Memories) – evoking the pivotal events of human history (Creation Story – Silences), of personal life (love–birth–passing – Signs), and of world history (the Auschwitz cycle, that is, the Nazi dictatorship; the Budapest cycle, that is, the Communist dictatorship – Memories). These are subsequently complemented by photographs of military barracks – Ecce homo (1992) – and scenes of everyday life, carrying their message into the future like a message in a bottle – Palackposta (Message in a Bottle) (2026). Three philosophical questions – Why are we in this world? How should we act? What may we hope for? – confront the photographer with questions of passing and birth, life and death, or “life death” (Derrida, 2019, 275), prompting him to formulate an aesthetic credo and take an ethical stance. In Sándor Apáti-Tóth’s photographic art, aesthetics and ethics are closely intertwined – his artistic credo is a categorical imperative.
To erect a memorial, to make visible, to remember and remind – this is the ethical law. To “strip things down to their essence” (A.T.S. 2021) – this is the aesthetic law. Technical mastery, artistic invention, a purified visual language, powerful abstraction, disciplined composition, “brutal honesty”, and “a way of seeing attentive to the movements and laws of the inner world” (A.T.S., 2018) are characteristic of Apáti-Tóth’s style.
The Creation Story provides the narrative framework – hence the biblical solemnity of the visual language of the Silences cycle and the afterlife, etched in black and white, of everyday objects (mortar, wheel, house, fence, sickle, shopping bag, disc, sweep well, ladder, hat), sacred spaces (bell, church, pews), the peasant way of life – farming (grains of wheat), animal husbandry (horses, eggs, bones), handicrafts (the potter at his wheel) – people (Anyó (Old Mother), Apó (Old Father), Korongozó (Potter at the Wheel)), and landscapes shaped by the elemental forces of nature (floodplain, shifting sand, shadows, mound).
Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor provides the compositional principle, the organising principle governing individual images, groups of images, cycles, exhibitions and albums – “whenever I hear the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, my soul is uplifted, as though I were flying or soaring” (A.T.S. 2021). Hence the elevated quality of Apáti-Tóth’s compositions, that aesthetic surplus, or aura (Benjamin 1980), which, despite technical reproducibility, transforms individual photographs, groups of images, exhibitions and albums into works of art.
Bartók’s Allegro barbaro provides the rhythm – “I sense in it something primordial, musical roots, roots of sound welling up from the depths, which always send a shiver through me” (A.T.S. 2021). Hence the philosophical (Heidegger), psychological (Freud) and aesthetic (Derrida) experience of the duality between the familiar and the eerily alien (Unheimlichkeit).
Beat literature, Kerouac’s “unconstrained way of life”, the Animals’ The House of the Rising Sun, or Ghymes’ Sirálylány (Seagull Girl) (A.T.S. 2021) are equally at home in Apáti-Tóth’s world. The sacred and the profane, the particular and the universal, discipline and freedom, classical music and folk or popular music coexist side by side – hence the recurring motifs and the polyphony of interwoven voices.
Found Pictures (1988) – Intermezzo – marks the transition between the first and second creative periods. The photographs found in a “bizarre and unlikely place”, in his grandmother’s deathbed (A.T.S. 2008), experiment with the use of photography in painting while confronting us with questions of space and time, body and soul, the self and the other – mysterium tremendum et fascinosum. Hence the philosophical depth of the longing for the other and of passing, the human body and the puppet, portraits and woodcuts, pathless roads, dissolves, reflections, the minutes before the Big Bang, and Rorschach tests. Found Pictures is a volume for four hands – an encounter between photography and poetry. Sándor Apáti-Tóth writes the images, Tibor Zalán the poems. They do not speak about one another but to one another, inviting all to “join in the conversation” (Mitreden) (Gadamer 1991, 38).
The Poetics and Ethics of Composition – Sándor Apáti-Tóth’s Categorical Imperative
Atlantisz (Atlantis, 2015) – Néma zene (Silent Music) – Poetry had always been part of Sándor Apáti-Tóth’s work: in his creation of symbols, his composition of images, his choice of titles, and the way he composed individual cycles, exhibitions and volumes, as well as his entire artistic career. In the Atlantis (2015) cycle and volume, however, he no longer merely “dwells poetically” (Hölderlin, quoted in Heidegger 1994, 191) in his images, but speaks as a poet in poems developed in the “darkroom of language” (Derrida 2009, 19): in the title poem, the ars poetica, the image-title-poems inserted between the individual pieces, and the coda. The Atlantis cycle is an uninhibited play with colours, words, forms, and analogue and digital techniques. The discipline and compositional rigour remain, and the themes return – cultural history, personal history, history – but in this cycle the leading roles are played by Greek culture (Atlantisz kapujában (At the Gate of Atlantis), Mágikus kő (Magic Stone)); an autobiography narrated in the first person (Nagyapám órája (My Grandfather’s Watch), Nagyanyám félbevágott körtéje (My Grandmother’s Halved Pear), Nagyapám félberágott kiflije (My Grandfather’s Half-Eaten Crescent Roll), Anyám almája (My Mother’s Apple), Apám kalapja (My Father’s Hat)); traces of life (Életnyomok (Traces of Life)); and cosmic events (A nap napja cycle (The Day of the Sun), Galaxis (Galaxy), A Vénusz és a Hold (Venus and the Moon)). Standing At the Gate of Atlantis, we hear the voice of Harsonás (The Trumpeter) counterpointed by the trumpets of the angels of the Book of Revelation; A hegedűkészítő műhelyében (In the Violin Maker’s Workshop), the silence of the music locked within is broken by the sounds of Péter Eötvös’s Atlantisz, composed to Sándor Weöres’s Silent Music, while the images – Égi lajtorja (Heavenly Ladder), My Mother’s Apple, My Father’s Hat – refer back to earlier exhibitions and point forward to those and the photographic albums still to come: A.T.S. 70 (2018), Csendéletek? (Still Lifes?, 2021), At the Gate of Time (2024), Palackposta (Message in a Bottle, 2026). The Art of Fugue in photography – and a gift of fate that Atlantis was first presented at Fuga, Budapest Center of Architecture, in two voices: Márton Szilágyi and Zsófia Szilágyi.
Az alma és fája. 100+75 (The Apple and Its Tree. 100+75, 2023) – Két szólamú invenció (Two-Part Invention) – A jubilee exhibition of two photographic artists: István Tóth, with Nehéz út volt (It Was a Hard Road), and Sándor Apáti-Tóth, with My Father’s Hat on the cover. “Did I get the prize because I am István Tóth’s son, or because the picture really is good?” the younger István Tóth asked the elder István Tóth on their way from Pécs to Cegléd after receiving the award from János Szász. “You got it because the picture is good,” came the unequivocal reply. István Tóth knew that there can be no compromise in art. The artist must find his own path, his own way of seeing and his own mode of expression if he is to become himself rather than a shadow of the Father or the Master. “Nothing grows well in the shadow of a big tree,” Constantin Brâncuși once replied when asked why he had turned down Auguste Rodin’s offer. The younger István Tóth found his own path as Sándor Apáti-Tóth, but according to the same inner law: “Measure yourself against the universe!” (Attila József, Ars poetica)
A childhood experience set him on this path – the place from which he started and to which he always returns to gather the power of light:
“My earliest memories of childhood: overnight an enormous amount of snow had fallen, and at the dazzling light flooding into the room I ran to the door, exclaiming: how the world has changed!
That experience became a defining one in my life; every morning I wake with the thought: how the world has changed!
I was given my first camera when I was six. Just as prehistoric man scratched drawings onto the walls of caves, I capture images of vanishing worlds. Of the beautiful, the good, the ugly, the evil. I tried other things as well, but repeatedly I had to turn back to retrieve an image from beneath the thick blanket of snow.
I could not not be a photographer.” (A.T.S., 2026)
At the Gate of Time. Other Dimensions (2024) – Passió (Passion). The texts and images evoke the Son’s earliest memories and the Mother’s final days. Birth and passing away are recurring themes in Apáti-Tóth’s photographs, but in this exhibition the Son confronts the Mother’s death – or rather, his fear of her death. Augustine, Attila József, Péter Esterházy, Jacques Derrida, George Szirtes: so many Sons who have written the story of the Mother’s death. Confessions, Kései sirató (Late Lament), A szív segédigéi (Helping Verbs of the Heart), Circonfessions, Előhívás. Anyám regénye (Developing. My Mother’s Novel): so many texts in which the Son mourns the Mother. The photograph My Mother’s Apple appears as the counterpart to My Father’s Hat in the Atlantis (2015) and Still Lifes? (2021) exhibitions and albums. In the Atlantis photo album, the diptych is given the title Lehántott kert (Stripped Garden). The mother and father themselves do not appear, only the images of memory associated with them: the apple, the hat, the garden. The diptych stages absence: the peeled apple skin coils around the green apple like the sloughed skin of a snake. Could this garden be the Garden of Eden? The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and of eternal life? The forbidden fruit? Eve’s apple? The apple of Aphrodite or Helen of Troy? In its very concreteness, My Father’s Hat counterpoints the possible mythological and biblical meanings of My Mother’s Apple, while the use of the possessive reinforces the work’s private mythology.
In the exhibition Az alma és fája (The Apple and Its Tree), the father’s way of seeing takes centre stage, while in At the Gate of Time. Other Dimensions (2024), it is the mother’s story that comes to the fore:
“My mother is dying. Or at least the end of her earthly existence is drawing near:
Her mind is clear, and she gives straightforward, lucid answers to questions:
Then suddenly she is overcome by panic:
She begs us to leave this place; during the night someone took her down into a
long underground corridor, took her farther and farther, and she barely found her way back.
This happened many years ago, yet the memory, far from fading within me,
returns from time to time. Who took her down there? What did she see? What made it
so terrifying for her? That corridor must have ended somewhere –
was there an exit, a door or a window?
When the idea of creating this cycle occurred to me,
I began searching for similar accounts and stories; for a door or window
left slightly ajar, or at least a keyhole
through which I might peek.
I am not in the habit of giving up on my goals; I am on my way. Meanwhile,
I take photographs. This is as far as I have come.” (A.T.S. 2026)
The images can be divided into three groups, all three of which address the question of life and death, and in each group some shade of arsenic blue and white appears. Arsenic blue heightens the sense of distance, the beyond, the unknown and the alien. White signifies, on the one hand, innocence and vulnerability, the light glinting on the surfaces of familiar objects, plants and foods, but, at the same time, the sublime, cold and distant radiance of a dazzling whiteness: “The great brightness hurts my eyes. / I am lost, I think.” (Attila József, Óda (Ode)). This world is at once familiar and unfamiliar, reassuring and unsettling, near and distant. The gate of time opens onto other dimensions, but the living can venture only as far as the gate or the bank of the River Styx; they can see only unknown signs and lights, only the ominous light glinting on familiar objects and foods. Unless, that is, they descend into the underworld, as Persephone or Odysseus did, or journey through Hell, Purgatory or Paradise, as Dante did under Virgil’s guidance. Each of the three groups can be divided into further circles, not under the spell of the nine bends of the River Styx or Dante’s numerology, but in accordance with the compositional order of Apáti-Tóth’s volume. At the centre stand the diptych Anyám legkedvesebb virága a sárga rózsa (My Mother’s Favourite Flower Is the Yellow Rose) and Átjáró (Passage): not a geometric centre, but rather a golden section, closer to poetics than to geometry. The yellow roses are flowers from the wreath placed on the mother’s grave; in the background, barely legible, are the name and the dates of birth and death. White light from behind the gravestone illuminates the image, while messages can be seen on the white ribbons of the wreath. They can be seen, but not read. Messages from the living to the dead woman, who has already disappeared from their sight through the Passage. What can we read in these messages? Signs of an unknown world: Ismeretlen jel (Unknown Sign), Ismeretlen totem (Unknown Totem), Kizuhanva az időből (Fallen Out of Time), Barbár totem (Barbarian Totem), Áldozati kő (Sacrificial Stone), Fénykút (Well of Light), Túlpart (The Far Shore). Messages from a world long past: Ikarosz (Icarus), A Stüx folyón (On the River Styx), Az alvilág révésze. Kháron ladikja (The Ferryman of the Underworld. Charon’s Boat), Apokrif (Apocrypha), Elixír (Elixir). The objects, accoutrements, flowers, plants, figures and events of everyday life: Repkény (Ivy), Virágom virágom (My Flower, My Flower), Hűség (Fidelity), A kert vad gyümölcsei (The Wild Fruits of the Garden), A kertész lányai (The Gardener’s Daughters), Az odvas fa (The Hollow Tree), Óriásgomba (Giant Mushroom), A kertész palatáblája (The Gardener’s Slate), A kertész kedvese (The Gardener’s Beloved), A kertész éléskamrájában (In the Gardener’s Pantry), A kertész cipője (The Gardener’s Shoe), Gyöngy (Pearl), Kenyér (Bread), Bor (Wine), Desszert (Dessert), Üzenet (Message), Hátsó udvar (Backyard), Message, Tűzmasina (Fire Machine), Vásárfia (Fairing), Flowers on the Grave of an Unknown Soldier. And in the final circle, the seasons – Szeptember (September), Október (October) – the times of day referring to historical events – Október 23. 7 óra 35 perc (23 October, 7:35 a.m.), Október 23. 7 óra 44 perc (23 October, 7:44 a.m.) – and celestial phenomena – Napfogyatkozás (Solar Eclipse), Telihold (Full Moon) – which give rhythm to the events, date them and render them timeless, and against which we are at once celestial bodies and Mákszemek (Poppy Seeds).
Háborúk árnyékában (In the Shadow of Wars, 2025) – “If the intelligent inhabitants of a distant civilisation were to seek me out and ask me how I live today, I would have to answer honestly that I live well, in peace and harmony in my personal surroundings, yet when I look at my planet, I live in the shadow of wars. And they would not understand my answer, because the very concept of war would be absent from their world. As a ‘picture-writer’ – János Arany’s coinage – I would turn to my photographs for help. No, I would not seek to show rivers of blood; that would be too simple and misleading. Instead, I would show places, objects, faces. Spilt blood is absorbed by the earth and dries away, but the horror remains in people’s souls – passed down from one generation to the next.” Thus writes Sándor Apáti-Tóth in the introduction to the exhibition (A.T.S. 2025). The exhibition’s black-and-white photographs evoke the horrors of twentieth-century wars, the Second World War and communism, at a time of wars in the twenty-first century. Pihenő Krisztus (Christ at Rest), Fogoly (Prisoner), Életnyomok (Traces of Life), landscapes floating in nightmarish light, Flowers on the Grave of an Unknown Soldier, the time stopped on Nagyapám óráján (My Grandfather’s Watch), and the furrows on the faces in Fivérek (Brothers) suggest that wars in heaven and on earth have devastated the landscape, animals and human beings and sealed their fates, as though “the history of humanity were itself the history of war,” as Tibor Zalán remarks at the opening: “The organising principle of this exhibition was neither war nor shadow, but the human soul’s response to the compulsion of everyday existence. (…) Sándor Apáti-Tóth neither shouts in our faces nor whispers in our ears. He speaks directly about what filters through from the world into his perceptions day after day” (Tibor Zalán 2025). He speaks directly; he speaks the truth: “You know this well: the poet never lies.
The real is not enough; through its disguise
Tell us the truth which fills the mind with light
Because, without each other, all is night.” (Attila József, Thomas Mann üdvözlése (Welcome to Thomas Mann, translated by: Vernon Watkins)). Through his photographs he speaks of hope, for the yellow flower in the pot proclaims that, despite crushed revolutions and the experience of war, even in the shadow of new wars we must not relinquish hope: “That once again the world will know a feast” (Mihály Vörösmarty, A vén cigány (The Old Gypsy), 1854).
Palackposta. Emlékek a XX. századból, a vasfüggöny keleti oldaláról (Message in a Bottle. Memories from the Twentieth Century, from the Eastern Side of the Iron Curtain, 2026) – Rekviem (Requiem) – The exhibitions and albums Memories, Ecce homo and In the Shadow of Wars have already offered glimpses of some of the pivotal events of the twentieth century. The Memories cycle is “the imprint of Nazism”: “The images from Auschwitz, the related chilling, bleak black-and-white photographs, presented a harrowing world” (A.T.S. 2026). Barracks, gates, shoes and spectacles thrown into heaps: the profound pain and shock of a world devoid of people and devoid of humanity. The Ecce homo series is “a symbolic representation of the Communist dictatorship” (A.T.S. 2026): abandoned barracks, ownerless chairs, discarded symbols, a human head amid an emptied space, a weed, desolation. Heavenly Ladder appears here as well, as a kind of passage between different ages and worlds, but it acquires a new meaning – or, rather, lends a new meaning to the film-frame images mounted on metal plates, which evoke old reels of film. Along their perforated edges, like the rungs of a ladder, we can move from frame to frame, upwards or downwards, or from right to left and left to right. It is as though we were in the darkroom of the era, at the very moment when the images begin to emerge, whether they are photographs of the Second World War – Egy második világháborús veterán szellemi sérült fiával, kutyájával (A Second World War Veteran with His Intellectually Disabled Son and His Dog, 1985) – or photographic series depicting the impact of the Communist dictatorship on everyday life – Lim-lom (Junk, 1976), MÉH hulladékgyűjtő telepen (At a MÉH Scrap Collection Yard, 1978), Egy állami gondozott lány (A Girl in State Care, 1979), Egy néhai kulák utolsó lova (The Last Horse of a Former Kulak, 1970), Egy vagyonától megfosztott kulák (A Kulak Stripped of His Property, 1973), Egy kulák városi házának bontása (Demolition of a Kulak’s Town House, 1982), Egykori villasor helyén épült lakótelep (Housing Estate Built on the Site of a Former Row of Villas, 1985) – icons of major cities – Bécs, Práter (Vienna, Prater, 1984), Moszkva, Vaszilij Blázsennij (Moscow, St Basil’s Cathedral, 1987) – political events – Szovjet Barátság Termelőszövetkezet kertészetében (In the Market Garden of the Soviet Friendship Agricultural Cooperative, 1980), Egy munkásőrgyűlés tribünje (The Rostrum at a Workers’ Militia Rally, 1972), A Nagy Októberi Szocialista Forradalom ünnepén (At the Celebration of the Great October Socialist Revolution, 1976), A II. világháborúban elesett szovjet katonák földi maradványainak újratemetése (Reburial of the Remains of Soviet Soldiers Killed in the Second World War, 1977), Éljen május 1. (Long Live May Day!, 1981) – or the aftermath of disasters – Óriásgombák a csernobili atomkatasztrófa után (Giant Mushrooms after the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster, 1986). “And yet I was still left with a sense that something was missing,” Apáti-Tóth remarks in the exhibition description. “I felt that, however appalling the atrocities that had occurred in the past, the picture would only be complete if I added that, in the second half of the century, life – everyday life – continued inexorably on its course, with its small, ordinary joys and sorrows, with love and death. After all, our individual, personal memories are also part of collective memory” (A.T.S. 2026). This is why the exhibition also includes scenes of everyday life capturing its people and events – Halászó fiú (Boy Fishing), Testvérek születésnapja (The Siblings’ Birthday), Filozófus, avagy a falu bolondja (Philosopher, or the Village Fool, 1973), Lakodalmi harmonikás (Accordionist at a Wedding), Egy fotótúra emléke (Memory of a Photo Tour, 1973), Egy régi lány (A Girl from Long Ago, 1978), Poéta (Poet, 1975), A poéta kedvese (The Poet’s Beloved, 1975).
In this exhibition, Sándor Apáti-Tóth allows us a glimpse into his workshop: we become witnesses to the process of development. “Photography always bears witness, while raising questions in us: What is testimony? Who bears witness to what, to whom, about whom?” writes Jacques Derrida in his analysis of Frédéric Brenner’s photographs (Derrida 2003, 103). But who bears witness to and for the witness, and who testifies that the witness is a true witness rather than a false one? Having experienced the horrors of the Second World War, Paul Celan writes: Niemand / zeugt für den / Zeugen (Celan, Aschenglorie, 1967). No one bears witness for the witness; nevertheless, Celan believes in the power of words and poetry: “The poem, as one manifestation of language, is essentially dialogical and can therefore be a message in a bottle, cast into the water in the hope – certainly not always with unwavering hope – that somewhere, sometime, it will wash ashore, perhaps in the region of the heart. Poems, too, are in this sense on their way: they are headed towards something. Towards what? Towards something open and occupiable, towards a person who can be addressed, who may perhaps be you: towards an addressable reality. It is, I believe, such realities that are at stake in the poem. And I believe that considerations of this kind accompany not only my own efforts but also those of other poets of the younger generation. These are the efforts of someone above whom stars made by human hands race across the sky; someone homeless in a way never before imagined, with no roof over his head and thus exposed to the most terrible adversities; someone who, with his entire being, turns towards language, wounded by reality and longing for reality” (Celan 1993, 28).
For Sándor Apáti-Tóth, the photograph is a message in a bottle: “The confinement caused by Covid made life difficult for many people, but it gave me an extraordinarily exciting task: immersing myself in a photographic archive that has been growing for nearly five decades and contains tens of thousands of images, I began supplementing the earlier group of photographs by extracting small stories from it. I now cast it into today’s ocean of images as a message in a bottle; perhaps someone will find it” (A.T.S. 2026). Whoever finds it must learn to read the signs and messages, Apáti-Tóth’s coded writing with light. “Fallen out of time,” they must immerse themselves in this world, although two travelling companions may help them find their bearings: the photographer, who is also a master of words, and his writer-companion, who, by his own admission, never wanted to be a writer. He would rather have been a coachman, or a painter, or a violinist, but in the end he nevertheless became a writer – “a somewhat obedient servant of words” (Tibor Zalán, 2026). Yet both know, as they play their four-handed piece in the albums Found Pictures and At the Gate of Time. Other Dimensions, that viewers or readers must themselves decipher the message concealed in the bottle that has found them “in the region of the heart.”
The Photograph as a Memory Sent Ahead – Sándor Apáti-Tóth’s Signature
Heavenly Ladder, Horgászó fiú (Boy Fishing), Prisoner – three representative works by Apáti-Tóth that bring the different cycles into harmony. The Ladder already appears in the Silences cycle, on the fifth day of the Creation Story, between Templom (Church) and Padok (Pews). Evoking Jákob lajtorjája (Jacob’s Ladder), the everyday object becomes, within this sacred space, a symbol connecting heaven and earth. The outlines of the ladder emerge in the black-and-white photograph, but the backlighting dazzles the viewer, who can therefore only surmise rather than see whether an angel or a human figure seems to be climbing the ladder – or whether the whole scene is merely a dream or vision. In the version dedicated to Szilveszter Ördögh (2008), and later in Atlantisz (Atlantis, 2015) and Message in a Bottle (2026), the physical reality of the Heavenly Ladder is far more concrete, yet it loses none of its poetic power. In the dedicated version, its poetry derives from the personal gesture and the allusion to the passage between life and death; in Atlantis, from object poetry and poetic objectivity, from vezető (conductor/guide) as a transitional title, and from the relationship between Heavenly Ladder as an image title and the image–title–poem. In the exhibition The Apple and Its Tree (2023), it is paired with Christ at Rest, while in Message in a Bottle it becomes charged with philosophical meaning: can we throw away the ladder once we have climbed it? Who will carry Love across? (László Nagy, Ki viszi át a Szerelmet (Who Will Carry Love Across?)) Who will carry the message to the far shore? Jacob’s ladder, Wittgenstein’s ladder, Weöres’s ladder – images from the Bible, from philosophy, from poetry. The Heavenly Ladder comes closest to the poetry of Weöres. We cannot know what awaits us when we climb the ladder, since no one has ever returned from there; nor can we throw the ladder away once we have climbed it, as Wittgenstein suggests (Wittgenstein, 1989, 6.54), especially if we agree with Weöres: “Beneath you the earth, above you the sky, within you the ladder.” (Sándor Weöres, Szembe fordított tükrök (Mirrors Turned to Face Each Other))
Boy Fishing – a triptych, or an invention in three voices – belongs to the “drastic, gut-wrenching, shocking photographs” of the Memories cycle, in which Apáti-Tóth employs “a highly reduced tonal version” of black and white (A.T.S. 2021), drawing on the techniques of graphic art and woodcuts. The arrangement of the three images – hook, portrait, fish – suggests, beyond the explicit story of fishing, an implicit story: that of being thrown into existence, confinement within the self, and exposure to historical events. The hook threatens not only the fish but also the life of the boy fishing; as a punctum, it cuts into the studium (Barthes, 1985, 32–35), wounding the gaze – the boy’s, the image’s, the viewers. Hence the disconcerting gaze of Boy Fishing. Apáti-Tóth’s portraits rarely look us directly in the eye, yet the images have their eye on us. What we see and what looks back at us do not always coincide; it takes time for the image to reveal its secret, which nevertheless remains secret. “Only the portrait, therefore, can provide the subject with that speech of its own, without voice or language, which no other mode of speech can provide for it,” writes Jean-Luc Nancy (2010). “Who has ever photographed a sentence? And its thing-like silence, which kills on the surface. Who has ever photographed anything other than this silence?” asks Jacques Derrida (Derrida, 2009, 14). What, then, is the secret of Apáti-Tóth’s portraits? The portraits of Silences stare vacantly before them – Old Father, Old Mother; those of Signs gaze into the distance – Kettős portré (Double Portrait), Támaszkodó (Leaning), Nyakláncos (Woman with a Necklace); the portraits of Found Pictures – Homokarc (Sand Face), Mélyből (From the Depths), Közeledő (Approaching), Kéreg (Bark) – look out at us from the depths of time, from the bark of trees, with an almost emptied gaze. Only the female figure in Szerelem (Love), scratched across by tree branches, looks us directly in the eye: in her gaze is the enchantment of the love hymn of the Song of Songs, on her face the moving story of Orpheus and Eurydice, while we may also read in it the insight powerful enough to shake the dominion of Hades: “One who is mortal can only love another mortal immortally.” (Attila József, Az én szívem (My Heart))
Prisoner – a four-part image, or an invention in four voices – refers back to the earlier cycles through its composition, use of colour and choice of subject. At the time, Apáti-Tóth created, as a kind of “counterpoint” to the black-and-white photographs, “occasional groups of colour images, four-part compositions,” thereby further intensifying “the dramatic effect of the black-and-white images” (A.T.S. 2021). His choice of colour echoes the brown-toned images of Signs and the overwhelming experience of death encountered at the moment of birth. The fish as a symbol recalls the composition of Boy Fishing: there the fish already lie lifeless on the shore; here, as prisoners, they are confined in a spherical aquarium or a stemmed glass, like exiles in the midst of an idyllic landscape, yet there is still some hope of survival, however slight that hope may be. As we follow the movements of the captive fish, we cannot for a moment forget that we, too, have only a glassful of hope left.
Nevertheless, Apáti-Tóth’s images are not dominated by despair or apocalyptic visions, even when they evoke them. Far more prominent is the endeavour to preserve the traces of a vanished world; the recognition that “one day we must all / leave Atlantis”; the desire that “As long as we can, / let us delight / in being inside” (Sándor Apáti-Tóth, Atlantis, 2015); and the conviction that we are in this world in order to leave behind a “meaningful trace” (A.T.S. 2018).
References
Apáti-Tóth, Sándor: Genezis, Csöndek (Genesis, Silences), Cegléd, 2000, p. 9.
Apáti-Tóth, Sándor – Tibor Zalán: Found Pictures, Cegléd, 2002.
Apáti-Tóth, Sándor: Hatvanadik születésnapomra (For My Sixtieth Birthday), 2008. https://www.apatitoth.hu/szulinapra_a.php
Apáti-Tóth, Sándor: Atlantis, Apáti Bt., Cegléd, 2015.
Apáti-Tóth, Sándor: A.T.S. 70, Apáti Bt., Cegléd, 2018.
Róbert Rigó in conversation with Sándor Apáti-Tóth: “Világéletemben szabad ember voltam” (I Have Been a Free Man All My Life), published in the September 2019 issue of Forrás, pp. 89–96. A.T.S. 70, 2018, 01–05.
Apáti-Tóth, Sándor: Csendéletek? (Still Lifes?), Apáti Bt., Cegléd, 2021.
Szabolcs Farkas in conversation with Sándor Apáti-Tóth: Nagyok (The Greats), Kossuth Radio, 27 January 2021. In print: Csendéletek? (Still Lifes?), Cegléd Gallery, 17 June–17 July 2021.
Apáti-Tóth, Sándor: Alma és fája 100+75 (The Apple and Its Tree 100+75), Apáti Bt., Cegléd, 2023.
Apáti-Tóth, Sándor – Tibor Zalán: At the Gate of Time. Other Dimensions. Apáti Bt., Cegléd, 2026.
Zsófia Vidra in conversation with Sándor Apáti-Tóth: A pillanat művésze. Beszélgetés Apáti-Tóth Sándor fotóművésszel (The Artist of the Moment. A Conversation with Photographer Sándor Apáti-Tóth), 4 January 2026: https://www.mma.hu/muveszeti-hirek/film_es_foto/-/event/10180/a-pillanatmuvesze
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Zalán, Tibor: Opening address for Sándor Apáti-Tóth’s exhibition In the Shadow of Wars. G7 Gallery, Cegléd, 12 December 2027. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpNyhfTu_g