Abstraction in white and black

Photography can be a refuge, especially at times when there is nothing to identify with in the real world, or what there is to identify with is miles away from what is desirable and even far from what is acceptable. Photography is then an opportunity to escape from this external determination and, as a creative process, it is also an opportunity to experience freedom. Creation.

Dr. János Szász’s life is worthy of attention not only because he was able to turn everything that stood in his way into a creative force, but also because he consistently pursued this, even if it did not receive any real recognition in the domestic community at the time. And his life’s work would have deserved attention even at that time. His bold compositions are reminiscent of László Moholy-Nagy’s paintings, his clear objectivity of his work is reminiscent of Csaba Koncz, his architectural photographs of Lucien Hervé, among others. And his photographs of snow-covered landscapes are a companion to those of the Italian Giacomelli and the Czech Koudelka.

His social situation within the framework of a given system fundamentally shaped his life. After graduating from university, he was unable to enter the legal profession because of class restrictions, so he worked as a decorator, a graphic designer and then trained as a photographer. From 1958, he worked as a building photographer for the Pécs Design Company, capturing the planning and construction of the first socialist district, Uranváros, and the changing city.

The prefabricated buildings under construction, the momentary events of the street, the vanishing world of vernacular architecture are always presented in Szász’s imagery in a tight composition, with a free use of perspective. He presents the world around him as a structure visible to reality, whether he photographs the curved line of a farmhouse porch wall and its meeting with the firm straightness of the roof, or directs his attention to the rows of vines lined up in the snow.

He sees not only in shapes but also in rhythms, giving his repetitive images a pulsating quality. In a series of post-edited, post-zoom cut-outs, people abstracted into figures appear in the space of a horizontally cropped field of view, doing whatever they have to do, without any personality. His visual world is also defined by abstraction, which can be interpreted not only as a degree of abstraction in his work, but also as a distance from the ‘here and now’.

By eliminating the shades of grey between white and black, he reaches their absolute extremes, rendering unreal the space they create, in which the figures that appear exist almost as shadows of themselves. He achieves this by a process of his own, incorporated into the chemical process of enlargement, because not only the taking of the photographs but also the process of enlargement is part of his image-making activity: his images are, in this sense, also made in the darkroom.

He is a founding member of the Mecsek Photography Club, founded in 1957, and an active participant in the work of the workshop, along with Rezső Halász, Miklós Lantos and Ernő Tillai. He regularly submits pictures to foreign competitions and achieves success. He exhibits at numerous international photo exhibitions from Sao Paolo to New Delhi. Since 1958 he has been publishing in photography magazines, writing specialist books, and since 1962 he has been teaching at the I. sz. Vocational School in Pécs, where he founded the National High School Photography Competition in 1966.

In addition to capturing the changing cityscape, in 1960 he was also commissioned to capture the disappearing architecture of villages. The result of this work, which began at that time and eventually spanned a decade and a half, is the volume ‘In the Footsteps of Our Folk Architecture’ (Technical Publishers, 1976), which wins prizes both within and outside the country.