Sylvia Plachy – When Will It Be Tomorrow
Opening of the exhibition: February 20, 2016. 18 pm.
Open to the public: February 21 – March 17, 2016
Location: Transylvanian Art Center, Sfântu Gheorghe
Sylvia Plachy is an unavoidable talent of contemporary photography. In 1956, after the revolution, the world-famous Budapest-born photographer crossed the Austrian border with her parents. Part of the way they were hidden by corn in a horse-drawn farm cart. Two years later the family settled in the New York area, where she has been living with her family since then.
She took her first photographs in the Austrian Alps at the age of 15 during a school trip with an Agfa Box camera a gift from her father. The picture was of a black goat in the snow-covered white landscape.
Gabriella Csizek curator about the exhibition
Sylvia Plachy’s humanism and commitment to truth are not in the harmonious presentation of the world or in search of its beauty; instead, she makes us see the back story with an almost imperceptible subtlety. She sees the fallibility of human existence and reveals cracks and layers of fragility in the faces or course of events. She senses the moment and converts this feeling into an image mapped onto light-sensitive paper.
She often conceals her portraits, almost displaying them as quasi-still lifes. Her subjects are never beautiful or ugly; they are people who are just who they have become and who they could be. Sylvia holds a soul-mirror in the form of a camera in her hand.
All of her images are a piece of fiction, yet genuinely real at the same time. She never finishes a story but shows it, thus giving life to the image.
Her special portraits include her photos of animals that parallel turning points in theirs and in moments of human life. Her approach lacks the notion of distance, as she does not document phenomena; she records encounters not only with people or animals but also with landscapes, spaces, and objects.
Her photographs, as if they were dreams, are rather like imprints of emotions than demonstration of facts. They tell stories without words as such.
The title of the exhibition is a sentence from her childhood she used to ask before going to bed. She intends to give this title to her next book as well.
The 110 images of the exhibition, When Will It Be Tomorrow are selected from her entire oeuvre with neither the places they were taken at, nor their theme playing a role in their inclusion, but they are chosen if they are attracted by the title’s question. The installation adheres to a logic of poetry. The individual walls are verses, bringing the halls and the exhibition as whole together into a poem, a series of poems. The sequences of images created through associations, emotions, and meanings are sometimes painful and eternally lonely. Still at times, they put a smile on our faces.
Some of the works have never appeared in any book or have been exhibited before in Europe. A short film by Adrien Brody about his mother is projected as part of the exhibit, while a 10-minute film portrait by Rebecca Dreyfus and Albert Maysles made in 2007 is also on view.