In 1952, at the age of twenty-four, Gabor Szilasi acquired a Zorkij camera, a Russian copy of the Leica IIIF, and started photographing. He developed film in the bathroom of his family's apartment in Budapest, and a few years later bought an enlarger, which allowed him to make rudimentary prints of his work. His earliest photographs are varied and exploratory: informal portraits of friends mingled with picturesque views of the city with its characteristic street vendors and tradesmen. These early images reveal the influence of European pictorialism, fashion and documentary photography, genres Szilasi would have been exposed to through books and magazines, as well as exhibitions by both professional and amateur photographers in Budapest. His moving record of the Hungarian uprising in late November 1956, his last photographs made before fleeing the country, is represented by three images in this section that reinforce the documentary impulses found in his early work.
Szilasi first returned to Budapest in 1980. Since then, he has revisited the city eight times, photographing its streets, buildings, and parks and making environmental portraits of people whom he had known earlier in his life. This more recent work has been motivated by the desire to connect a personal past with the present, and to create cultural records and architectural documentation similar to what he had produced in rural Quebec and Montreal.
Montreal: Architectural and Urban Views, 1959 to the present
"If you keep walking in Montreal in any direction, within 500 metres you're in a different
community: street views, people, architecture change." - Gabor Szilasi, 2008
In 1959 Szilasi settled in Montreal. He learned about the city largely from walking, exploring an unfamiliar place and deciphering an unknown culture through the lens of his newly acquired 35 mm Leica camera. Throughout the 1960s he created a series of picturesque urban views, but beginning in the 1970s, he sought more formal and systematic ways of representing both the city's urban form, and by extension, its urban life. […] In his 1977 and 1979 study of St. Catherine Street, a major, commercial thoroughfare running east-west across much of the city, he used a 4 × 5 inch view camera to respond to the disparate commercial, religious, and institutional buildings along its length. In 1980–81 he borrowed a panoramic camera, whose horizontal sweep allowed him to describe the character and qualities of a variety of urban spaces found throughout the city. During three successive summers, from 1982 to 1984, in marked contrast to the more austere black-andwhite work, Szilasi photographed buildings with electric and neon commercial signage in colour.
Through its sheer physical size and cultural and linguistic diversity, Montreal is perhaps unknowable in its entirety, but inhabitants construct their own image of the city, informed by individual circumstances and concerns. Szilasi's Montreal projects can be viewed as constituting a cumulative portrait of the city, seen through the filter of his sensibilities as he grew to understand and progressively record it.
Rural Quebec in the 1970s
"In looking at the changes that have taken place in rural Quebec, one cannot help but be fascinated by the strange mixture of old and new, sacred and profane. Before us is a society in transition where the giant figure of Mr. Muffler stands beside a statue of the guardian angel, and the television, flashing its images of contemporary life, sits next to the crucifix in the family home." - Gabor Szilasi, 1977
Szilasi spent the decade of the 1970s extensively photographing small rural communities and towns throughout the southern half of Quebec in a number of self-initiated projects. Beginning with a study of Isle-aux-Coudres and Charlevoix county in the autumn of 1970, he went on to photograph in the Beauce, the town of Lotbinière, at the western festival in Saint-Tite, and extensively throughout the Abitibi-Témiscamingue and Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean regions. At the outset, Szilasi did not envision this work, which has come to represent one of his most important contributions to Canadian photography, as a single project. What had been conceived in 1970 as a relatively modest study of a single community gradually evolved into a massive social and cultural document comprising hundreds of photographs, which includes environmental portraits, domestic interiors, architecture, and landscape and town views. With each phase, with each new region, Szilasi discovered continuities and commonalities. At the same time, he recognized local variations and regional particularities, and developed strategies for responding to these differences. Viewed now from a vantage point of more than thirty years, the entire body of work constitutes an invaluable record of these communities in a decade of economic and cultural transition.
Montreal: Portraits of Artists and Family, 1959 to the present
"I have made frequent excursions into street work, urban landscapes and interiors. Yet I have always returned to portrait photography. I enjoy the contact that occurs between the photographer and the sitter: conversation, silence, tension, relaxation, mutual exploration" - Gabor Szilasi, 1989
Portraiture remains at the heart of Szilasi's work, arising from his profound engagement with people and their experiences. While portraits are found throughout his Hungarian and rural Quebec work, those made in Montreal form the most extensive and distinctive group.
Almost all of the Montreal portraits are of people whom Szilasi has known well for a long time – his family, close friends, neighbours, fellow photographers, and artists – and, for the most part, were not made as part of a specific project, but arose naturally during the course of his daily life. As such they can be read in biographical terms, revealing his interests, friendships, and professional relationships. None was commissioned, and Szilasi has photographed a number of the subjects, such as his wife, Doreen Lindsay, and their daughter, Andrea, many times over the last fifty years.
Szilasi has been drawn primarily to environmental portraiture, a genre in which the setting – a person's home, work place, or even a public place – plays an essential role in elucidating the subject. How a person inhabits his or her space, and what the surroundings reveal about that person's interests, tastes, and sensibilities become inseparable elements in the final portrait. The setting never functions merely as a generalized or arbitrary backdrop, but assumes a leading role, offering evidence for our understanding of the person and contributing to the larger meaning of the image.