adam magyar

[berlin, germany]

intro’d to Adam when George shared his work on fb via this post:

Magyar was born and raised in the Hungarian city of Debrecen, a regional center of 200,000 just west of the Romanian border. His mother was a dentist, his father an architect and interior designer who created bars and restaurants for a state-owned company during the Communist era. The elder Magyar moonlighted as an artist, making fanciful light fixtures and other household objects out of copper in a workshop beside his home. “I grew up in my father’s workshop,” Magyar remembers. “I learned to work with tools, I developed a general understanding of materials. And I learned how to combine things.”

Magyar’s parents sent him to an elementary school that specialized in music, and he sang with Hungary’s most prestigious youth choir, performing in Finland and Greece when most travel to the West was banned. He attended an advanced technological high school, but he found the curriculum too theoretical and rebelled against the discipline. “I was the only one in the class who didn’t have to wear a uniform. I was never easily controllable,” he says. Magyar dropped out of college, taught himself computer code, built rudimentary computers, and supported himself doing graphic design on a freelance basis and, for two years, running a one-man business that printed corporate logos on pencils and cigarette lighters. “It was horrible, but it was money,” he told me.

The result was Urban Flow, a series of two-foot-high, six-foot-long prints that captured a parade of humanity marching through time: Those at the far right had passed by the sensor approximately two minutes before those on the far left. “Each little fragment is the present, and all these present fractions come together to give you the story,” Magyar explains. “By the time we see the story, it’s like our memory. It’s already past.”

He shoots hundreds of hours of video to obtain the results he wants; one of his favorites in the series, shot in 2011 at Alexanderplatz (see video), serendipitously captures, in the background, two little girls loping along the platform. Their graceful movements contrast with the stillness of the commuters in the foreground—a jolting reminder that that the image one is witnessing is not a photo, but a stretched-out moment—what Magyar calls “in-between time.” “Those girls were a real gift to me,” he says.

________________________

his talk at poptech nov 2013:

i was always interested in the rest, the unimportant ignored moments..

technique used for horse races and olympic games

i was especially interested in the flow..i wanted to capture this kind of ever changing nature of life, things are always going on minute after minute, day after day, …

i love details, i preserve the personity of these people.. so you see they are all real people..

it’s like measuring time.. not subjectively..  it’s like recording everything accurately, relentlessly

14 min – these are those moments that we tend to not really perceive, recognize..

i really like seeing inbetween… it’s really amazing how much invisible things they can capture

you might think i’m digging into people.. i don’t think it’s possible to dig into 200,000 souls.. but if i were able to do it – i would be fine with that..

i’m not interested in slow motion – that’s like a kind of eye candy – everything looks good there.. i’m interested in the area between still and motion..

_________

find/follow Adam:

his site: