Thinking back to the last century, I am struck by the image of two dictatorships: Nazism and Communism. And as fond memories of my youth and my adult decades. A significant stage in the first phase of my photographic career was my Memories cycle, which revealed the imprint of Nazism. The images of Auschwitz, the related, chilling, bleak black and white photographs, showed a world of anguish.
The material was completed after the regime change, with the addition of the Ecce homo series of images, a symbolic representation of the communist dictatorship. But I was left with an unchanging sense of incompleteness. I felt that, however blatant the horrors of the past, the whole thing would be complete if I added that in the second half of the century life, everyday life, went on inexorably on its own path, with its small, ordinary joys, sorrows, love and death. After all, our individual, personal memories are part of the collective memory.
While the confinement of the covid has made life miserable for many people, it has given me a uniquely exciting task: to delve into the tens of thousands of photographs that have been accumulating over nearly five decades, and to add to the earlier collection of images by highlighting small stories. I am now throwing them into the ocean of images of our time as a bottle post, perhaps someone will find them.
Sándor Apáti-Tóth