This city is a distant planet
“This city is a distant planet,
Living here is not bad and living here is not good ”
(Europa Publishing House – Jenő Menyhárt: This is the city, 1987)
In January eighty-seven, heavy snow fell, paralyzing the entire country. Budapest also shut down, and despite not having a camera, the fourteen-year-old Zoltán Molnár he realized he had become a photographer. Time stopped around him, he felt like he was walking in a still image and capturing those images in his head. Three years later, during the taxi blockade, the city stops again. Fortunately, the seventeen-year-old photographer already had a real camera by then.
Most vans a Spring festivalstarted two weeks ago Budapest Photo Festival one of the latter’s programs is Zoltán Molnár Wave station exhibition. At the same time as the exhibition, a book of his thirty-two-year-old paintings was published in Budapest. The photos are very exciting at first glance. It is as if we are holding a markedly domestic study of urban, street photography.
Step by step
A photographer’s first attempts usually don’t fit into the oeuvre, it’s a natural part of the school years. But Zoltán Molnár’s first steps were already very focused, the beginnings not only remained visible, but they became the cornerstones of three decades of hard work with concrete strength.
One of his first forerunners, for example, is the pioneering figure in Hungarian photojournalism, Károly Escher was at the Small School, where Klára Tőry attended the class of a photographic historian. His paintings in Józsefváros were commissioned by Imre Benkő, the winner of the Photojournalist’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021, on the Industry (today’s MOME). In parallel with his school studies, the development of a photographer took place, he did his tasks not only for his teachers’ grades, but he just went out into the street and took photographs. The photographs, which were graduated in 1998 and were taken for a task, exam or diploma, still work today and are connected to each other, as evidenced by the book and the exhibition.
The movement is slower, time stops
Eastern Railway Station, Blaha Lujza Square, Józsefváros, Csepel Works, Mayans and all kinds of events: there is a good chance that these stations can still be the favorite locations of a novice urban photographer. At Zoltán Molnár, the initial photo walks lasted for more than three decades. Maybe because he went to good places in the first place, he didn’t have to look for a new topic or location. To photograph a city as if it were a distant planet, all you need is an approach. Its basic experience is that the city stops, time stops. Although these places have changed a lot since then, the inclusions of Budapest have only changed, their status has progressed somewhat to the same extent as the slowly rising standard of living.
We can look at the actors in the same way: at the edge of our society, movement is slower. From the very beginning, Zoltán Molnár was interested in these extremes and this fringe world, where time passes more slowly. Since the first images were already important, the raw material could not change either. His relationship with the craft is so archaic that he also enlarged the images in the exhibition himself in his analogue photo lab. As a true lone wolf, the author holds his profession in his own hands.
There is nothing between two points
If we draw an arc between two historical points, we can usually see many lessons. The book is surrounded by two historical moments: the taxi blockade and the coronavirus epidemic. The work of the past three decades is a subjective but not speculative photographic description of this work. Even on a distant planet, life has not reached happiness, no one knows what happened in the two historical moments.
In the last three years he has left the old places, after thirty-two years he is looking for other connections to Budapest. We don’t know if the book is just closing or a milestone right now. THE Wave station the strangest thing about his photographs is that it doesn’t really matter exactly which one was taken in the last thirty-two years.