How did you get into making art?
I started making art naturally, like most children do, and simply never stopped. My parents then pushed me to learn painting the old-fashioned way from a proper painter (György Molnár) during school vacations in rural Hungary, and later at an after-school art class in my hometown in Germany, which also happened to have very good teachers. I then made the fatal decision to study Graphic Design and later Artistic Photography, thereby turning a childhood inclination into my “career,” for better or worse.
What are you currently working on?
I’ve recently started a new series called Brick Powder about Hungary and the things that make up a nation’s culture, in contrast to the political instrumentalization of national identity. It is a combination of staged and documentary images that hopefully create an underlying poetic exchange within the series. The title is an allegory for the dilution of culture: low-quality paprika powder, a key ingredient in Hungarian cuisine, is sometimes said to have been mixed with brick powder.
I’ve recently started a new series called Brick Powder about Hungary and the things that make up a nation’s culture, in contrast to the political instrumentalization of national identity.
Tomoya Imamura
What inspired you to get started on this body of work?
I should start by saying that I am Hungarian-Japanese, born in Germany, and I speak Hungarian on an arguably native level. When I first started photographing during my studies, I quickly found that Hungary was the easiest place for me to photograph because I know it intimately, but I don’t spend most of my time there. This gives me the distance it takes to see the particularities of everyday life there, despite having seen them a million times, while also allowing me to feel the difference from Western Europe.
I believe that, if my photography has anything to “say,” it will be about Hungary, its post-communist reality, and the nationalism that dictates its culture, but also about longing for a place that brings pain. Therefore, I see this work as a continuation of other series I’ve made about the Hungarian present over the years. In the end, I hope to make one grand series about Hungary over the course of my life, by the time I die.
Do you work on distinct projects or do you take a broader approach to your practice?
I generally follow a very conservative pattern when it comes to photography. I usually work on one main long-term series and a couple of smaller side projects that are either finished fairly quickly or only extended when a chance presents itself.
What’s a typical day like in your studio?
After my day job, I usually start working on a project from around 9 p.m. to 3 a.m. on a good day — meaning when I find the motivation and there is something to be done. Since I don’t photograph in a studio, I usually either work on a sculpture or find myself in a kind of desperate meditative state, reading and flipping through books and scrolling the internet for hours in the hope of sketching out a fragment of an idea.
Most of the actual photographing happens in stressful two-week bursts, when I have to organize staged images or visit places and events trying to catch a moment. Half the time, I just hijack social events and have to convince people to do what must seem like complete nonsense.
Who are your favorite artists?
Béla Tarr, Ronald Kitaj, Larry Sultan, Tobias Zielony, Lieko Shiga, Neo Rauch.
Where do you go to discover new artists?
The academic answer is: in exhibitions, where I always find a handful of works or ideas that I write down. The honest answer would be that, most of the time, some internet algorithm tends to wash something my way.
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