MONIKA MERVA: The City of Children

Rabbit Ears, Hungary, 2005
The City of Children (Kehrer Verlag , 2011)

Mouse, Hungary, 2004
Photograph (c) Monika Merva /All Rights Reserved

Photograph (c) Monika Merva /All Rights Reserved

In the Woods, Hungary, 2002
Photograph (c) Monika Merva /All Rights Reserved

Red Bottle, Hungary, 2005
Photograph (c) Monika Merva /All Rights Reserved

'Children generally know whom to trust, especially those who´ve experienced hardships. Monika Merva brought empathy and compassion as well as skill to this project and we can feel it in the children's responses. They allowed her into their private spaces and she's honored their trust with vivid, memorable portraits.' –Anne Wilkes Tucker, Curator of Photography, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

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The City of Children: Photographs by Monika Merva

"Monika Merva, a first generation American of Hungarian descent, has spent almost a decade visiting and photographing the children of Gyermekközpont in Hungary for this, her first monograph. Her photographs of the children are vivid and personal, the pacing of the rich, color images has a comfortably varied formal character. Though the cultural divide between the democratic West and former Soviet bloc countries seems almost unbreachable at times, Merva's images do so slowly — without obscuring their cultural specificity, they form a potent bridge between the viewer and subject."–photo-eye Books

ADAM MAGYAR: Squares

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517, 2007
Photograph (c) Adam Magyar /All Rights Reserved

Hong Kong II, 2007-2009
Photograph (c) Adam Magyar /All Rights Reserved

Hong Kong II, magnified
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Photograph (c) Adam Magyar /All Rights Reserved

Hong Kong II, Detail
Photograph (c) Adam Magyar /All Rights Reserved

I alter space. What you see in my images is artificial.
Real details can be used to create a non-existent reality.

ADAM MAGYAR, now living in Berlin, was born in Debrecen, Hungary. Magyar, Jeffris Elliott and 4 others (names tk) won the 2009 Photography Now PQ #99 contest. Debra Klomp Ching, co-owner of KLOMPCHING GALLERY was Juror. Their work will be published in issue #99 of Center for Photography at Woodstock's PQ Magazine. Magyar's work has won several other awards, including the 2009 International Photography Awards 1st Place in Fine Art/Collage for Squares and 1st Place in Special/Aerial for Squares, 2006-2007 Josef Pecsi Scholarship and the Hungarian Press Photo Grand Prize in 2004. I asked Magyar about this series:

Can you give a short detail of how you arrived at this project?
I like to work with simple, real and obvious matters like pedestrians. I started experimenting with different digital techniques, because I did not find places that I wanted to see in my images. I wanted to depict people in endless and seamless environments, without recognizable or particular surroundings. The images are really detailed, you can see a lot of tiny things if you go close to them.

Did you set up the people in the image #517?
In a sense I did. All the squares are artificially set up from hundreds of images that I took from about 4-5 meters high of pedestrians on sidewalks. This distance, or rather, closeness allows me to create extremely high-resolution images, thus allowing the viewer to survey each person close-up. Yet, observing the image at close range makes it possible for us to see it as a whole, while looking at it from a distance results in losing all the details.

ADAM MAGYAR WEBSITE
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