Preface - Lajos PARTI NAGY

Zoltán Vancsó has collected his most important photos as if saying: “they tell you what I am,” or, to quote Milán Füst, “they tell you what I once was.” As I am getting acquainted with this world of photos, it does not occur to me that they should be in colour rather than black and white. Indeed, it is their black-and-whiteness that makes them so rich and colourful. Now I am watching the photos, now I am reading the quotes from Milán Füst. It is winter outside: sometimes I think time flies, and then I think it has frozen. It is fun to be among Vancsó’s frozen film frames.
I am putting a few sentences on paper, then add or transfer some words. I am puttering around. This time an art serves as the inspiration for another art. I am now looking at the world through the medium of another art. I see the world through the eyes, outlook, personality, luck and craft of a photographer. I see the world through his system although – as Milán Füst says in one of Vancsó’s quotes: “There are things that tolerate no systematic approach and our whole life, I guess, is one of them.”
Yes, life is one of them. In fact, there is a system in life’s intolerance of a systematic approach. I am by nature receptive, subjective, rambling and curious. I would hate to offer a scholarly analysis of this excellent collection. Instead, I just jot down what comes to my mind and watch if my notes connect into a coherent train of thought. I wish my remarks aroused the readers’ interest in these pictures. I know of course that these photos, just like any other ones, speak for themselves.
When I watch photographs of any sort, I always become melancholic, I cannot help about it. For me they are “remembrance of things past;” they are the river into which, as is well known, no one can step twice. When approaching the river for the second time, not even my feet are the same. What are the things that catch Vancsó’s eyes? Mostly those that are possible but unlikely. That is what Milán Füst calls romantic. Even the most ordinary moment becomes important if it is recorded on film. Interest is in the eye of the beholder. In this sense every photo is extremely subjective. Why of so many things has an object attracted the photographer’s attention? In the same manner, why do I scribble down these and not those words?
For twenty years now, in my mind Barthos, the protagonist of one of my short stories, keeps thinking of a metaphor: “a photo is like a beautiful, soft fish tank. An artistic photograph, and even an amateur snapshot, is teeming with inarticulate and inaccessible things like a fish tank. And even if you could turn the tank over,” Barthos thinks, “and its content was pouring on you, you could not see the story behind the photos, merely its wet, slimy, green and gold ruins. But you can never turn that tank over – and it is good that way. All you can do is interpreting what you see on the photo, and that is by necessity nothing more than a mis-interpretation. Whenever you interpret, you are bound to mis-construe. And yet there is no way of breaking the glass walls of the fish tank. The irrepressible desire to break the walls of the fish tank is one thing, and actually doing it is another,” thinks Barthos.
I would not even attempt to give a professional assessment of these photos because I am not an expert on photography. And a preface like this should never be meant to offer one. Just as you cannot take a photo of the content of a poem, I could not, even if I wanted to, describe the content of a photo. All I can do is jotting down the thoughts that rush into my mind looking at them. I love them. I love watching the pathetic cardigans, kerchiefs, ungainly house frocks, permed hair and mini skirts of Vancsó’s East-European pilgrims; their resolve to reach their destination. I see them as oppressed transcendental insect-collectors who are ready to walk any distance to at least have a tired glance at the painted likeness of an angel or the face of a wretched old priest. But who needs my description of what these pictures show? Suffice it to say that Vancsó has noticed and recorded them. To give you an example, he has recorded a young boy with a crew cut as he stands in awe with a Christ’s head in the background; the sun-lit nylon sheet serving as drapes, and the photographer noticing the “imprint” of the holy in a profane sight.
Vancsó’s photos are never banal, even when he chooses trivial subjects, as for instance, when he shows the beauty and transience of waves, which are the most timeless and ephemeral of all drapes. I put down the words: “sea, seaside, water, puddle and wave” several times. The words “dog and bicycle,” and then I write: “chador, butcher’s shop and shop window: the nudity and exposure of halved carcasses of sheep hanging in the shop window denude the women who go there to buy mutton.”
Images of the album that have caught my imagination include the inconspicuous but undeniable presence of steel bars in Cuba; a couple kissing in an improbable way on a terrace at a table with gaudy wrought iron legs; a one-legged man walking along the highway in a stride; the wind forming an improbable cap from the hair of a woman on the deck of a ship; the “semi-hard” body of an old dame on the seaside, with an empty, wind-blown skirt hanging on a tree branch in the front of the photo; a black little pig and a discarded Christmas tree on the balcony of a tenement in flowery springtime; elderly women kissing goodbye to one another in front of a shop window, a dog and a painted seaside landscape; old-style, horse-drawn hearse being in a momentary idleness (said Milán Füst: “the sun is shining charmingly during funerals”); two strangely shaped identical saltcellars standing on the empty table of a coffee-bar; a child running towards the sea like a phosphorescent angel – and the list could go on endlessly. Whenever I look at Vancsó’s photos, I discover the unusual, the strange and the improbable in them. It goes without saying that I am aware that what I find special in his photos is not the same thing that motivated Vancsó to produce them or select them for this album. What I find interesting is an aspect of those photos that are special for me here and now.
And that is the very aspect that makes this album worthy of paging through time and again. By the time the reader reaches the last photo – which is perhaps the most emblematic of all of them – he instinctively starts paging through it once again. If not for any other reason, to look for a blown-up version of a part of one of the photos. “A table covered with a white drape and standing on the sandy beach of a bay; two covered chairs and the silhouette of tall blocks in the background. It is like a metaphysical wedding: the table serving as an altar, the chairs as the bride and the bridegroom, the latter carrying a briefcase.”
If, finally, you wish to know what this album is all about, I can tell you: it is about lights and shadows. Now that you ask, let me tell you: this book is not about something but rather for something. For somebody. For me. For you, Dear Reader. For anyone interested in photographs. My task is to look at them, try to interpret them, wonder at them, dip them into my imagination, my inner self, complement them, and produce my own unique visual image of them.