A Cabinet of Curiosities - The Photographic Practices of Gábor Kerekes
A Cabinet of Curiosities - The Photographic Practices of Gábor Kerekes

Summary/Abstract: Here I would like to discuss a photographer who brings a unique hue to the Hungarian palette of photography. Both in his personality and work, Gábor Kerekes combines the most modern twenty-first-century photographic methods with alchemist practices. There is a self-evident artlessness in his use of methods ranging from the camera obscura and Polaroid to the latest digital techniques. All this is done with the care and creativity that conveys the kind of mysticism inherent in his studies of nature in retro style. Perhaps in all contemporary Hungarian photography, it is in Kerekes’s art that one can find the presence of the quality expected until about the beginning of the twentieth century in every master photographer, that is, to be able to choose from his arsenal of many techniques the one most suited for transmitting a given message. Hence Kerekes, unlike most photographers at the mercy of contemporary technology, works with great independence, which is of great benefit to his pictures.

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