András J. Nagy has had a long series of nomadic years: born in Hungary, the photographer who spent his childhood in the South Bronx and South Brooklyn, was eight years old when he started shooting graffiti. Than his photographs, taken on other continents, document ephemeral spaces, streets, parks, public transport riders, underpasses and passers-by, as well as poetic moments in spaces and the interconnections and contradictions of the existence of those present there.
In addition to the vulnerability of those who exist in harsh urban spaces, who cannot retreat into their own homes, or who seem to keep capitalism in motion, J. Nagy’s photographs are able to show the intensity of their presence and their intense gestures, in many cases as the timeless protagonists of urban space, as mythological figures or almost embodied spirits. These characters are not dramatic, individualised figures – although they are living in the reality of the present, and their portrayal is both intimate and transient.
Hereby and and often seemingly incidental captions and showing the peripharical spaces with solutions characteristic for structural nature of classical avant-garde photography,Nagy J. creates a narrative form through which the viewer becomes part of the situation and who experiences a momentary – but at the same time – a temporal-beyond urban existence.