I shall wander along the road
of endless Milky Way
for a star in the sea of stars,
and rest in starry bay.
written by Gábor Pintér
translated by Viktor Horváth
The exhibition by Szalontai titled Starry Bay features select photos from a series of photographs that span several decades. The photographs and short, moving images installed in lightboxes depict the world of seas and ports, and the stories of those living there and passing through.
Szalontai captures the fascinating and perceptible encounters between water and the coast, whether they take place along the shores of photogenic Iceland, crowded Shanghai, Greece’s popular Corfu, Romania’s peaceful Sulina, or in large industrial or port cities like Gdan´sk in Poland or Dublin in Ireland. Starry Bay is the collection compiled by Ábel Szalontai. Waves that ease off, ripples, splashes, and stormy waters. Gazes scanning the skyline. Buoys, fishing nets, and hulls. Awaiting favorable weather conditions so that the ships can leave port. Sailors, fishermen, islanders, passersby. The harbor is the place for encounters and goodbyes, arrivals and departures. Misty, sunny, night- and snow-covered shores. There is constant buzzing, regardless of the time of day.
At the same time, the harbor is also a recreational, strategic, administrative, and economic hub, a place for battles, exchanges, and trade. The cargo of ships arriving from long voyages and foreign lands is stacked on top of each other in large, unremarkable containers and barrels with exotic goods hidden within. Traditionally, depictions of ships go back thousands of years, starting with hieroglyphics in Egyptian papyrus scrolls to the galleys represented in Greek vase paintings, to the almost entirely accurate depictions of our age by Renaissance masters, and finally to photographic representations. With time, the galleys decorated with paintings and carvings gave way to the multi-masted caravels serving during the Age of Discovery and colonization, and nowadays the ports are filled with heavy steel hulls, gigantic cruisers and liners. Navigation begins and ends with reaching the shore.
“Near the sea, looking at the horizon, immersed in the crowded or desolated world of ports, I always find that somehow everything is about the past there. The present is the eternal cycle of the repeated past. It is here that memories become more important here, the past is more important than the future. In addition, I feel a sense of inclusion and acceptance on the islands, perhaps because those living there remember that they came from somewhere else as well. Harbors are seaside havens, resting places for the mind, which ages slower there than the body,” says the photographer about his images.
Ábel Szalontai’s photographs are merely a small slice of a vast visual repository of water. The quiet in his photographs create tension: the abundance of symbols, the endless skyline, the small details of harbor life make these invisible stories visible.
Judit Gellér