Einstein's camera: how one photographer portrays time
Adam Magyar is a computer geek who left the university, a self-taught photographer, Rub Goldberg of high technologies, a world traveler, and a conceptual artist with growing international recognition. But no one could have imagined that he could also be a terrorist until that morning, before he went down to Union Square metro station in New York.
At that time, Magyar was immersed in a long-term project at the intersection of technology and art called Stainless (“Flawless”), creating high-resolution images from passing trains and passengers, using sophisticated software written by him and a modified industrial camera. The scanning technique he developed — combining thousands of frames wide in a pixel into one image — allows him to take passengers by surprise as they fly with noise and clanging through the dark subway tunnels, fixing them in ghostly images filled with details that no one can capture. ordinary camera.
Magyar installed his usual set of devices — a camera, a scanner, voltmeters, blue and black cables, a battery, a tripod, a laptop — and waited until the train rolled out onto the platform. What he didn’t expect was the vigilance of New Yorkers surviving on September 11, some of whom complained to the police about a man with long hair, carrying something that looked like hastily assembled surveillance equipment. It was not long before the traffic police officer approached him.
- What are you doing? - he asked.
“Scanning trains,” Magyar replied.
The policeman took Madyar to a room in the bowels of Union Square station, where he called a couple of plain-clothes officers to interrogate him. They examined his equipment, carefully reviewed his digital files. “Tell us who you work for?” The question followed.
As soon as Madiyar convinced them that he was not studying the metro for illegal purposes, that he was an artist ( his website helped him with examples of his work), the police agreed to a $ 25 fine for breaking the ban on using a tripod at the station and let him go.
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This was not the first time Adam Magyar had to explain his work to intrigued observers. Born in Hungary in 1972, Magyar began photographing when he was well past twenty, wandering the streets of Asian cities and taking photographs of Indian street vendors, Hindu monks and Himalayan students. His work quickly evolved from generally accepted documentary photography to surrealistic, radically experimental images that reflect his passion for finding new and unusual ways of using digital technology. A self-taught engineer and programmer who assembled his first computer while still a teenager, Magyar takes his pictures using some of the most advanced photographic devices in the world, modified using programs that he writes himself. The additional code, also its authorship, removes almost all distortion, or noise, from the data received from the camera, producing images of incredible clarity.
In the growing number of photographic and video art created over the past ten years, Magyar bends the usual notions of time and distance, stretching milliseconds for minutes, catching moments in resolution that the naked eye could never perceive. His art originates in such diverse sources as Albert Einstein, Zen Buddhism, and even the 60s TV series The Twilight Zone. The images themselves - smooth silver subway cars, serious passengers, lost in their own inner worlds - are beautiful and elegant, but also cause anxiety. “The moments that I take are meaningless, they have no history, and if it is possible to catch the essence, the quintessence of being, then everything is probably imprinted,” says Magyar in one of the many mysterious comments about her work, which also reflect her hypnotic craving and its elusiveness. There is a feeling that you are entering into another dimension, taking place between stillness and movement in a world of distorted time, where the laws of physics do not work.
The work of Magyar is a fruitful interaction of technology and art, two disciplines - one objective and mathematical, and the other completely subjective, - which were not always perceived as harmonious or generally compatible. However, they were intertwined, and technological breakthroughs often made possible new forms of art. Five thousand years ago, Egyptian craftsmen heated desert sand, limestone, potash and copper carbonate in kilns to obtain a synthetic pigment known as "Egyptian Blue", which contributed to highly realistic stylized portraits of the second and third dynasties.
By the fifteenth century, paint mixed with clear oils, linseed and walnut oil began to replace opaque tempera based on egg yolk, filling art with new color and naturalism, which paved the way for such Renaissance masters like Jan van van Eyck, Tintoretto and Caravaggio. Experiments of the nineteenth century with light-sensitive materials capable of capturing and stabilizing an image, starting with Louis Daguer's copper-coated silver sheets and iodine vapor, led to the invention of photography. In the 1950s, rapid advances in the creation of emulsions and photosensitivity of the film allowed filmmakers to take their craft to the streets and shoot with minimal light, thereby highlighting the new wave of naturalistic films by Jean-Luc Godard and other innovators.
Digital photography, first developed in the 1970s, gave rise to two types of image input devices: conventional digital cameras and scanners. The first shoot the object entirely in one exposure. The latter, in contrast, capture the image sequentially. The sensor moves along an object, such as a printed document, and photographs it line by line, and then collects the cumulative image. Scanners, image editing programs and high-speed production video cameras have allowed conceptual artists to break out of the framework of traditional photography and create increasingly abstract and surreal images.
Doris Mitch , who lives in northern California, scans plants, marine animals and other natural objects in her old Mac G4, then edits in Photoshop, creating stunningly vivid compositions that cannot be obtained with the most light-sensitive cameras. Penelope Umbriko creates huge collages from images found on the web. Her project “541,795 suns (from sunsets) on Flickr”, created in 2006, reflects her enthusiasm for the Internet and how he crushed other realities. A Latvian-born photographer Misha Gordin creates frightening black-and-white composite images, such as his famous Crowd series (“The Crowd”), which evoke a feeling of overwhelm by the totalitarian system. Gordin once wrote: “In conceptual photography ... an idea or a vision is transformed by a camera into an image related to reality only by my imagination. The initial process is similar to writing poetry. Only after that it becomes more technical. ” Magyar, an admirer of Gordin's works, also creates black-and-white photographs and videos saturated with a similar spirit of burden, although his people are not bound by a political system, but by the limits of their own perception.
I first met Madyar in his neat two-room apartment in Friedrichshain, a sanitized area of ​​the former East Berlin. He has long, dark hair, a thin beard and a mustache, the pensive look of dark eyes. He looks like a portrait of a Slavic saint of the Renaissance or an aged rock musician living in one of the last buildings seized by squatters in Berlin.
Magyar has been living in Berlin since January 2008, but he has only held several exhibitions there and does not communicate with local artists. “The galleries here are slightly punk, and my works are the fruits of engineering,” he told me, brewing espresso in the kitchen, while his girlfriend, Zazi Porchalmi, a Hungarian translator, whom he knows from high school, served Christmas cookies in the living room. After living in Berlin for six years, Magyar hardly speaks German, which reflects how his immersion in other disciplines - "I spent my time here, learning two programming languages, I had no time for anything else," he explains - the attitude an outside observer who permeates his work. As he grabs moments from the life of metro passengers in his Stainless series, so I was able to catch Madiyar during a brief pause in his life, full of movement: he always moves forward.
Magyar was born and grew up in the Hungarian city of Debrecen, the regional center with 200 thousand inhabitants, immediately to the west from the Romanian border. His mother was a dentist, his father - an architect and interior designer, who created bars and restaurants for the state company in the communist era. The elder Magyar worked as an artist, making fancy lamps and other household items made of copper in the workshop near his house. “I grew up in my father’s workshop,” Magyar recalls. - I learned to work with tools, I gained a general understanding of materials. And I learned to combine different things. ” Magyar's parents sent him to elementary school with an in-depth study of music, and he sang in Hungary’s most prestigious children's choir, performing in Finland and Greece when most of the trips to the west were banned. He enrolled in technology high school, but found that there was too much theory in the program, and rebelled against the discipline. “I was the only one in the class who did not need to wear a uniform. I was never easily controlled, ”he says. Magyar dropped out of university, learned to program, assembled simple computers and lived on the money he received for his work as a freelance graphic designer, and besides, he led his own business for two years, printing corporate logos on pencils and lighters. He told me: "It was terrible, but it was money."
By this time, the Berlin Wall had fallen, the Eastern Bloc had collapsed, and Magyar could quench the growing thirst for wandering. “I always wanted to travel as much as I can remember. I was about four years old when I dreamed of escaping and wandering around the world, ”he recalls. “My father once told me that there used to be people whose profession was to travel, and I took his words for granted. I liked the idea of ​​living with one suitcase of things, moving from place to place. It seems she is firmly stuck in my head. When I received my first paycheck, I just left. I think I am something like a regular traveler. ” Having traveled with a backpack in Morocco, at 27 he first came to India. “It was the hardest place I’ve been to,” he says. - Colors, smells - all this is difficult to digest. She became for me something of Mecca, and I began to return there every year. ”
The life of a regular traveler honed the skills of Magyar as an observer and heightened the feeling that he was an outsider. On the one hand, he was in constant motion. On the other hand, he was able to remain motionless for a long time, simply by observing the flow of life. Once he spent six months studying the river in Varanasi, the ancient religious capital of India on the banks of the Ganges. During that trip, he asked Zazi to bring him a book for novice photographers, which he won as a prize in elementary school. “I was almost thirty,” he said. - And I began to study the values ​​of the diaphragm, the light and began to type in a dark room. I liked it very much. ” A year later, he documented the daily life at a private school in Darjeeling, a hill station in the Himalayas in northeastern India, and his series of black and white photographs won first place at the annual Hungarian reportage photography competition. “He never worked too fast,” recalls Zazi. “If he thought a person or place was exciting, then he spent hours with him.”
But Magyar quickly realized that he was bored with doing simple documentary photography. He installed the camera inside the cinema in Varanasi, and took photographs of the audience almost in complete darkness with an exposure of one minute. He made shots of passengers sitting in the backseat of a taxi in Calcutta, and people imprisoned in the frame of the medical reception and elevator doors in Shanghai. Hannah Frizer, former head of Light Work, a cooperative founded by artists who organized an ambitious exhibition of Magyar Kontinuum in three US museums in 2013 — Light Work in Syracuse, the Houston Photo Center, and the Griffin Museum of Photography in Boston — says that “the elevator series central to understanding his work. It reflects the idea of ​​taking the camera, making it motionless, and taking pictures of people over and over again. He does not look at people with a rating glance. He avoids asking a lot of questions. Instead, it is only the experience of observation and presence, and the definition of life through this stream. ” This work also reflected Magyar’s growing interest in the limitations of human sensory perception in comparison to what was possible with the use of new and old technologies, and became the prototype of his efforts to push the boundaries of what we can see and experience. “I wanted to enclose people in a cage, in a sense. “I thought about how little choice we have when we choose our path,” he told me. - We are able to see only from a narrow point of view, no matter what we do. Our knowledge is really limited and very few. ”
Magyar began experimenting with scanning in 2003. “I wanted to get out of the ordinary photo frame,” he said. - I remember that I did not sleep much. I sat out all night thinking how to do it. ” In his early experiment, Magyar assembled his own primitive scanner using an East German slide projector that threw a narrow beam of light. Then he built a platform of Lego cubes, which allowed this beam to "scan" the object, slowly sliding from top to bottom. A conventional SLR camera saved all the scanned lines at one time, collecting one image from them during one minute exposure. Thus, the scanner cut a minute of time into thin sections, and the camera collected sections back, creating one image from all these moments. Magyar scanned itself, experimenting with different movements, which created distorted final images. “When I turned around, the resulting image showed my body wrapped in a corkscrew,” he says. - It was an interesting technological experiment, but only. I abandoned him for several years. ”
Nevertheless, he was still admired by the idea of ​​shooting different parts of one person or several people at different times, creating a still image of “small pieces”, as Madiyar himself says. This coincided with his growing interest in what he calls the “ever-changing nature of the present”, the constant flow of life that did not succumb to attempts at a simple visual display.
In 2006, when he spent several months in Shanghai, he had an insight. “I had the feeling that I would, so to speak, scan the stream of people. I started looking for places of the right type where people would go at the same speed. ” First, Magyar studied the escalators in the malls of Shanghai. Then his gaze fell on the city streets, in particular, large intersections or bus stops with a constant stream of people. As soon as a concept appeared in his mind, he began to develop the technology to implement it. “It was a continuous study,” he says. “I spent a few weeks before I figured out all the details.”
The answer, as Magyar understood, lay in a modified version of the slit camera, which is used to shoot photo-finishes on racetracks and at Olympic competitions, recording the sequence of time in one image. Such cameras were rare and cost many thousands of dollars, so Magyar decided to make it himself. He connected the lens from the medium format camera to another sensor and wrote a program for the new device. Total cost: 50 dollars. He turned the traditional method of scanning inside out when the sensor moves along a fixed object. This time, the sensor will remain in place while the scanned objects move, photographed by a strip of one pixel width (this is the main principle of the camera for a photo finish). Magyar mounted the device on a tripod in a crowded area of ​​Shanghai and scanned pedestrians passing in front of the sensor. Then he combined over 100,000 consecutive lines of high-resolution photography on a computer.
As a result, Urban Flow appeared, a series of 30 cm high prints and 2.5 meters in length, which captured the parade of humanity marching through time. Those on the right walked past the sensor about two minutes ahead of those who were far left. “Every little fragment is a present, and all these pieces of the present come together to tell you a story,” Magyar explains. “By the time we see the story, it’s like a memory: it’s already gone.”
The eerie distortions of motionless objects and objects in motion remind viewers that they are looking at a graphic image of time, not of space. Quickly traveling buses were compressed into cars like Smart. Buses slowly stretched out like passenger planes. Slow-trousers appeared in slow-moving people, the feet stretched out like skis or became narrow, like Oscar Pistorius composite prostheses. And because of the curious features of scanning technology, everyone was moving in the same direction. “The horizontal axis does not reflect space, it does not mean left and right, but earlier and later,” he says. “If two people cross a pixel at the same time, it will look as if they are walking together.”
Urban Flow is perceived at the same time as a comedic and with a bit of melancholy, as a vision of human destiny and mortality that distorts time and consciousness. The choice of black and white display was made after a long deliberation. “I experimented with color, but people looked like color confetti, which was not my goal,” Magyar says. - This is not a carnival, for me it is something sad. We are all moving to the same destination, and it’s like death. ”
Lars Torkul, a design engineer living in Shanghai, met Madyar in China and came to his Shanghai apartment to see the process of working on a new project. “This place shocked me with its appearance,” recalls Torkul. “You had to squeeze past water bottles and other things into and out of the room to get to the table.” After Torkul saw a hastily assembled prototype for shooting, Magyar showed the first shots of the Urban Flow series on his computer screen. “I was delighted with the beauty and clarity of images,” says Torkul. “I said,“ Adam, this is unbelievable, are you going to show it? ”But he didn’t even think about it ... There were so many technologies that he hadn’t worked with before. He said: “These are still far from finished works.” I answered: “What are you talking about? They may be ready very soon! ”
Torkul introduced Magyar to his friend, the French artist Thomas Scharvery, who had just opened the Island6 gallery in a converted warehouse in Shanghai’s artists quarter. Slotted photos of Magyar fascinated and Sharvery, and he proposed to organize an exhibition. Magyar sold almost all of a dozen or so works that he printed for the exhibition - at a reasonable price from $ 700 to $ 1,400 - and received orders for a few more. Magyar was struck by the fact that his work generally had a commercial value: “I returned to Hungary, but I knew that on the basis of this I needed to start doing something.”
His next major project was Stainless , shot inside the metro stations of big cities such as Paris, Tokyo and New York. It was a qualitative leap forward. He was able to buy a high-quality industrial camera and a slit scanner device, designed for high-resolution imaging of printed circuit boards, bottles and other objects moving rapidly along assembly lines, in order to detect micro-cracks and other defects that cannot be detected with other types of cameras. The slit camera obtained by him uses one row of light-sensitive sensors to continuously scan objects moving at high speed, removing almost all distortions.
Stainless deliberately reminds us of theoretical physics, in particular, it refers the viewer to the mental experiments of Albert Einstein.The Magyar fixed camera, aimed at a moving train, echoes Einstein's hypothesis that “remote simultaneity” —the idea that two spaced events occur at the same time — is not absolute, but depends on the coordinate system of the observer. In the famous thought experiment, Einstein imagined two observers - one standing inside a moving train car and the second one standing on the platform when this train passes by - who perceive the same flash of light at the moment when their paths intersect. The passenger of the train sees that the light hits the front and back of the train at the same time, the motionless observer sees that the light reaches these points at different times. Similarly, Magyar distorts time and shows the subjectivity of human perception:his slit camera transforms a moving spot into a frozen image of impossible clarity and stillness, into a reality that is not perceived either by the passengers arriving at the station or by those who are waiting for the train on the platform. People in his trains travel together, but at the same time separately, lost in their own thoughts, often hypnotized by their mobile devices.
“You start to pay attention to how these people interact with their devices, and how little they interact with each other,” says Hannah Frizer, former head of Light Work. However, these ghostly images can also be seen as a triumph of human society, which Magyar began to appreciate more when he traveled the world. Belt passengers who hold the metro in Paris, Shanghai, Hong Kong, New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, Rome and Berlin all find striking similarities in appearance, facial expression and attitude to others, which overcomes cultural and geographical differences. In her notes to the exhibitions of works, Madjar Frizer drew a clear line between street photography of recognized masters, such as Diane Arbus, Gary Winogrand and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and how Madyar makes her photos.“The life he chronographs consists of ordinary people, not the most beautiful, eccentric, and poor, who usually attract the attention of photographers,” she wrote. “They were looking for differences, while Magyar finds similarities.” They moved through the city, while Magyar remained still and waited for people to pass by his camera ... He visits all new cities in different countries and on different continents until the features common to all mankind begin to appear. ”while people pass by his camera ... He visits all new cities in different countries and on different continents, until the features that are common to all mankind begin to appear. ”while people pass by his camera ... He visits all new cities in different countries and on different continents, until the features that are common to all mankind begin to appear. ”
Photos from the Stainless seriesalso showed the most impressive example of Magyar's tireless perfectionism. He desperately wanted to shoot in the Tokyo subway - “an incomparable subway system, an incomparable urban environment” - but the subtle blinking of lighting led to overexposed and underexposed frames that looked like vertical lines on his images. Magyar's solution: he spent the whole week traveling the subway with an exposure meter, measuring the level of illumination at all 290 stations. “I found five stations where the light was high-frequency, so I could start working there,” he recalls. “But inside the train, the light was still bad, so I spent three months creating a program that allowed us to get rid of these lines.” Magyar faced another problem when he was forbidden to work with a tripod in the New York subway system. He had to take it off his hands,which made the image even more distorted. He had to spend a few more weeks writing the code that eliminated them. Lars Torkul, a German design engineer, compares him to a Zen master. “In Zen Buddhism, you can train for five years before shooting a bow for the first time. This accurately describes what he does, Torkul told me. - Time does not exist for him. He lives and does his job clearly and in detail, just like in his images. ”- Time does not exist for him. He lives and does his job clearly and in detail, just like in his images. ”- Time does not exist for him. He lives and does his job clearly and in detail, just like in his images. ”
Shortly after the completion of Stainless , Magyar began to think about moving to moving images. After several months of research, he convinced the German manufacturer Optronis to lend him one of the high-end industrial video cameras that cost $ 16,000. Such cameras are used to shoot crash tests, study robotic manipulators, and even to analyze the movement of the hooves of horses participating in show jumping tournaments. Using high sensitivity and sophisticated software for analyzing TimeBench, the Optronis camera captures high-resolution images at an incredible speed: up to 100 thousand frames per second - for comparison, an ordinary movie camera shoots at 24 frames per second.
Magyar Flips Stainless Conceptupside down: now instead of standing on the platform, taking pictures of passengers rushing past, Magyar is located inside a moving car, recording video of motionless people on the platform, while the train enters the station with the camera. The ghost of Einstein again penetrates these images, and he again distorted time: Magyar was shooting video at a speed 56 times faster than normal, turning the 12-second blurred station views into 12-minute films, tormented by its slowness. Its passengers are standing together, but separately, with the refined, three-dimensional grace of the statues - only a bend of the lips or an elongated finger in the direction of the iPhone suggests that these people were captured in a super-slow shooting, stuck in a lasting moment. Magyar extracts feelings from a scornfully small moment of time. "I want to capture what“What’s happening in milliseconds, the origin of which you don’t even realize,” he told me. - I stretch the moments - the present, now - because, as humans, we live only in the past and the future. But the only existence that we have is now, and we do not even take this into account. ”
Breathtaking video clarity Series Stainless- it is also the result of the most complex software code that he ever had to write. In his experiments with industrial cameras, Magyar discovered that the quality of the image was ideal for measuring speed, distance and volume, but not quite suitable for the needs of the artist. He wrote sophisticated programs to improve the quality of images taken in low light and poor contrast. Another problem was digital noise - vertical, horizontal, lines and other random distortion, a typical problem with highly sensitive digital sensors. He spent almost two years intermittently, developing programs to reduce noise, solving one problem and immediately facing another. “Engineers don't have to work on this, but I have to. I can not sleep. I have been working on this for months and not stopping.When I meet a new problem, I have to find a solution. ”
A couple of days after our first meeting, I arrange to meet with Madyar at Alexanderplatz, one of Berlin’s most crowded underground stations, to show his Stainless project.. I arrive at the peak hour and wait ten minutes on one side of the platform filled with people, until it appears. His long hair is spread over a black park, which is complemented by black boots, black jeans and a black backpack. In a backpack, Magyar wears his modified Optronis camcorder and laptop. Four cables, blue and black, protrude from his backpack. He says volumetric equipment makes him feel like a “Ghostbusters hero.” After his encounter with the police at Union Square, Magyar modified the equipment so that it could be carried in a backpack, but in my opinion, the new layout is even more suspicious. Six aboveground and three underground lines converge on Alexanderplatz, creating a constant stream of people all morning. “I’m looking for a place where there are no gaps in a crowd, and the more people, the better,” he tells me.“In each city there are only a couple of places where you can catch such a crowd, and this is one of them.”
Together with Magyar, we jump onto the train and drive one station to the Rosa Luxemburg square, then go over the platform and take the next train to Alexanderplatz. In a filled wagon, the Magyar gets the unit out of its backpack. The gray aluminum frame of the camera, connected to the viewfinder, the handle and the cables that connect the device to his laptop, looks like a prototype rolled up in a garage. When he points the lens at the window, the red and green lights flash. “They always ask me:“ Did you do it yourself? ”,” He says to me while people around are watching with curiosity. After a few minutes, we roar into the station with a crash, and Magyar begins recording. After twelve seconds, everything is ready.
We stand and wait four minutes until eight gigabytes of new data are copied to his laptop (during such trips he usually takes two external hard drives onto which three terabytes of data can be written). Magyar studies a procession of beautifully lit faces that he took from a 12-second blur, and says he is pleased. To get results that suit him, he shoots hundreds of hours of video. In one of his favorite clips in the series, filmed in Alexanderplatz in 2011, by happy coincidence, two little girls running skipping across the platform in the background. Their graceful movements contrasted with the stillness of people in the foreground - an unexpected reminder that the image in front of the viewer is not a photograph, but a stretched moment - Magyar calls it "intertime". "These girls have become a real gift for me,"- he says.
Of the many disciplines that Madiar had to deal with in his work, marketing was the most difficult. He got into the world of art by chance, and in the early stages of his career was puzzled by how this business works. “It’s not very pleasant to live with the naivete of a 20-year-old when you are 35,” he admitted a couple of days later when we were driving through Berlin to his workshop in the luxurious Savigny-Platz district on a rainy evening. Magyar was going to send several prints of Urban Flow to an art exhibition in Miami Beach. “I started doing this at the worst time - 2008, 2009 - when the art market collapsed,” he says. Five years have passed since that moment, and Magyar now receives significantly more money for his work - up to $ 14,000 for a Stainless print, - but it is still unpleasant for him to engage in business connections and self-promotion, which are necessary for development. “He has no commercial instincts,” says Lars Torkul.
However, Magyar learns. He became a more confident and convincing speaker, organically weaving together the conceptual and technological aspects of his work. This year, for the first time, he was able to live only on the income from art. His work has been exhibited in galleries from Harvard University to Budapest. In February, his work will be shown as part of an exhibition of three artists of urban life in the prestigious Julie Sol gallery in Manhattan. The exhibit will include Stainless Video and several prints from his Squares series.("Squares"), created between 2006 and 2009: photos of hundreds of people taken from pedestrian bridges, then joined together in Photoshop into imaginary city squares taken from a bird's-eye view. “I have nothing to complain about,” Magyar says.
Magyar is planning a future installation in the gallery, where he will project several videos onto the big screens surrounding the audience, and accompany the video with ominous sound effects - slow down squeal of brakes, background sound of the subway station. “Sometimes people tell me that when they watch a video, they think of death. It's a bit like getting out of the body, ”he says. Andrew Zolli is executive director of Pop Tech, an organization that brings together innovators in art and science. After he encountered the work of Magyar, he invited the artistmake a speech at the Pop Tech conference in Camden, Maine. He has a different look at this work. “His works say that we are alive,” Zolli insists, “that the world is an even more vibrant place than we imagine.” In any case, life or death, Magyar enjoys any reaction: “What could be better for an artist than this? This is an incredible feeling when you can do what others think about. And when this happens, I'm really happy. "
The author is Joshua Hammer . Editors - Mark Horowitz , Tim Heffernan . Fact Check - Hilary Elkins. Photo - Andreas Chudovski . Translation - Yuri Karabatov.
At that time, Magyar was immersed in a long-term project at the intersection of technology and art called Stainless (“Flawless”), creating high-resolution images from passing trains and passengers, using sophisticated software written by him and a modified industrial camera. The scanning technique he developed — combining thousands of frames wide in a pixel into one image — allows him to take passengers by surprise as they fly with noise and clanging through the dark subway tunnels, fixing them in ghostly images filled with details that no one can capture. ordinary camera.
Magyar installed his usual set of devices — a camera, a scanner, voltmeters, blue and black cables, a battery, a tripod, a laptop — and waited until the train rolled out onto the platform. What he didn’t expect was the vigilance of New Yorkers surviving on September 11, some of whom complained to the police about a man with long hair, carrying something that looked like hastily assembled surveillance equipment. It was not long before the traffic police officer approached him.
- What are you doing? - he asked.
“Scanning trains,” Magyar replied.
The policeman took Madyar to a room in the bowels of Union Square station, where he called a couple of plain-clothes officers to interrogate him. They examined his equipment, carefully reviewed his digital files. “Tell us who you work for?” The question followed.
As soon as Madiyar convinced them that he was not studying the metro for illegal purposes, that he was an artist ( his website helped him with examples of his work), the police agreed to a $ 25 fine for breaking the ban on using a tripod at the station and let him go.
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From the Stainless series, New York, 2010. Printed works have a length of more than 2.5 meters.
This was not the first time Adam Magyar had to explain his work to intrigued observers. Born in Hungary in 1972, Magyar began photographing when he was well past twenty, wandering the streets of Asian cities and taking photographs of Indian street vendors, Hindu monks and Himalayan students. His work quickly evolved from generally accepted documentary photography to surrealistic, radically experimental images that reflect his passion for finding new and unusual ways of using digital technology. A self-taught engineer and programmer who assembled his first computer while still a teenager, Magyar takes his pictures using some of the most advanced photographic devices in the world, modified using programs that he writes himself. The additional code, also its authorship, removes almost all distortion, or noise, from the data received from the camera, producing images of incredible clarity.
In the growing number of photographic and video art created over the past ten years, Magyar bends the usual notions of time and distance, stretching milliseconds for minutes, catching moments in resolution that the naked eye could never perceive. His art originates in such diverse sources as Albert Einstein, Zen Buddhism, and even the 60s TV series The Twilight Zone. The images themselves - smooth silver subway cars, serious passengers, lost in their own inner worlds - are beautiful and elegant, but also cause anxiety. “The moments that I take are meaningless, they have no history, and if it is possible to catch the essence, the quintessence of being, then everything is probably imprinted,” says Magyar in one of the many mysterious comments about her work, which also reflect her hypnotic craving and its elusiveness. There is a feeling that you are entering into another dimension, taking place between stillness and movement in a world of distorted time, where the laws of physics do not work.
“I learned how to work with tools, gained a general understanding of materials. And I learned to combine different things. ”
The work of Magyar is a fruitful interaction of technology and art, two disciplines - one objective and mathematical, and the other completely subjective, - which were not always perceived as harmonious or generally compatible. However, they were intertwined, and technological breakthroughs often made possible new forms of art. Five thousand years ago, Egyptian craftsmen heated desert sand, limestone, potash and copper carbonate in kilns to obtain a synthetic pigment known as "Egyptian Blue", which contributed to highly realistic stylized portraits of the second and third dynasties.
By the fifteenth century, paint mixed with clear oils, linseed and walnut oil began to replace opaque tempera based on egg yolk, filling art with new color and naturalism, which paved the way for such Renaissance masters like Jan van van Eyck, Tintoretto and Caravaggio. Experiments of the nineteenth century with light-sensitive materials capable of capturing and stabilizing an image, starting with Louis Daguer's copper-coated silver sheets and iodine vapor, led to the invention of photography. In the 1950s, rapid advances in the creation of emulsions and photosensitivity of the film allowed filmmakers to take their craft to the streets and shoot with minimal light, thereby highlighting the new wave of naturalistic films by Jean-Luc Godard and other innovators.
Digital photography, first developed in the 1970s, gave rise to two types of image input devices: conventional digital cameras and scanners. The first shoot the object entirely in one exposure. The latter, in contrast, capture the image sequentially. The sensor moves along an object, such as a printed document, and photographs it line by line, and then collects the cumulative image. Scanners, image editing programs and high-speed production video cameras have allowed conceptual artists to break out of the framework of traditional photography and create increasingly abstract and surreal images.
Doris Mitch , who lives in northern California, scans plants, marine animals and other natural objects in her old Mac G4, then edits in Photoshop, creating stunningly vivid compositions that cannot be obtained with the most light-sensitive cameras. Penelope Umbriko creates huge collages from images found on the web. Her project “541,795 suns (from sunsets) on Flickr”, created in 2006, reflects her enthusiasm for the Internet and how he crushed other realities. A Latvian-born photographer Misha Gordin creates frightening black-and-white composite images, such as his famous Crowd series (“The Crowd”), which evoke a feeling of overwhelm by the totalitarian system. Gordin once wrote: “In conceptual photography ... an idea or a vision is transformed by a camera into an image related to reality only by my imagination. The initial process is similar to writing poetry. Only after that it becomes more technical. ” Magyar, an admirer of Gordin's works, also creates black-and-white photographs and videos saturated with a similar spirit of burden, although his people are not bound by a political system, but by the limits of their own perception.
I first met Madyar in his neat two-room apartment in Friedrichshain, a sanitized area of ​​the former East Berlin. He has long, dark hair, a thin beard and a mustache, the pensive look of dark eyes. He looks like a portrait of a Slavic saint of the Renaissance or an aged rock musician living in one of the last buildings seized by squatters in Berlin.
Magyar has been living in Berlin since January 2008, but he has only held several exhibitions there and does not communicate with local artists. “The galleries here are slightly punk, and my works are the fruits of engineering,” he told me, brewing espresso in the kitchen, while his girlfriend, Zazi Porchalmi, a Hungarian translator, whom he knows from high school, served Christmas cookies in the living room. After living in Berlin for six years, Magyar hardly speaks German, which reflects how his immersion in other disciplines - "I spent my time here, learning two programming languages, I had no time for anything else," he explains - the attitude an outside observer who permeates his work. As he grabs moments from the life of metro passengers in his Stainless series, so I was able to catch Madiyar during a brief pause in his life, full of movement: he always moves forward.
Magyar was born and grew up in the Hungarian city of Debrecen, the regional center with 200 thousand inhabitants, immediately to the west from the Romanian border. His mother was a dentist, his father - an architect and interior designer, who created bars and restaurants for the state company in the communist era. The elder Magyar worked as an artist, making fancy lamps and other household items made of copper in the workshop near his house. “I grew up in my father’s workshop,” Magyar recalls. - I learned to work with tools, I gained a general understanding of materials. And I learned to combine different things. ” Magyar's parents sent him to elementary school with an in-depth study of music, and he sang in Hungary’s most prestigious children's choir, performing in Finland and Greece when most of the trips to the west were banned. He enrolled in technology high school, but found that there was too much theory in the program, and rebelled against the discipline. “I was the only one in the class who did not need to wear a uniform. I was never easily controlled, ”he says. Magyar dropped out of university, learned to program, assembled simple computers and lived on the money he received for his work as a freelance graphic designer, and besides, he led his own business for two years, printing corporate logos on pencils and lighters. He told me: "It was terrible, but it was money."
By this time, the Berlin Wall had fallen, the Eastern Bloc had collapsed, and Magyar could quench the growing thirst for wandering. “I always wanted to travel as much as I can remember. I was about four years old when I dreamed of escaping and wandering around the world, ”he recalls. “My father once told me that there used to be people whose profession was to travel, and I took his words for granted. I liked the idea of ​​living with one suitcase of things, moving from place to place. It seems she is firmly stuck in my head. When I received my first paycheck, I just left. I think I am something like a regular traveler. ” Having traveled with a backpack in Morocco, at 27 he first came to India. “It was the hardest place I’ve been to,” he says. - Colors, smells - all this is difficult to digest. She became for me something of Mecca, and I began to return there every year. ”
The life of a regular traveler honed the skills of Magyar as an observer and heightened the feeling that he was an outsider. On the one hand, he was in constant motion. On the other hand, he was able to remain motionless for a long time, simply by observing the flow of life. Once he spent six months studying the river in Varanasi, the ancient religious capital of India on the banks of the Ganges. During that trip, he asked Zazi to bring him a book for novice photographers, which he won as a prize in elementary school. “I was almost thirty,” he said. - And I began to study the values ​​of the diaphragm, the light and began to type in a dark room. I liked it very much. ” A year later, he documented the daily life at a private school in Darjeeling, a hill station in the Himalayas in northeastern India, and his series of black and white photographs won first place at the annual Hungarian reportage photography competition. “He never worked too fast,” recalls Zazi. “If he thought a person or place was exciting, then he spent hours with him.”
But Magyar quickly realized that he was bored with doing simple documentary photography. He installed the camera inside the cinema in Varanasi, and took photographs of the audience almost in complete darkness with an exposure of one minute. He made shots of passengers sitting in the backseat of a taxi in Calcutta, and people imprisoned in the frame of the medical reception and elevator doors in Shanghai. Hannah Frizer, former head of Light Work, a cooperative founded by artists who organized an ambitious exhibition of Magyar Kontinuum in three US museums in 2013 — Light Work in Syracuse, the Houston Photo Center, and the Griffin Museum of Photography in Boston — says that “the elevator series central to understanding his work. It reflects the idea of ​​taking the camera, making it motionless, and taking pictures of people over and over again. He does not look at people with a rating glance. He avoids asking a lot of questions. Instead, it is only the experience of observation and presence, and the definition of life through this stream. ” This work also reflected Magyar’s growing interest in the limitations of human sensory perception in comparison to what was possible with the use of new and old technologies, and became the prototype of his efforts to push the boundaries of what we can see and experience. “I wanted to enclose people in a cage, in a sense. “I thought about how little choice we have when we choose our path,” he told me. - We are able to see only from a narrow point of view, no matter what we do. Our knowledge is really limited and very few. ”
Optronis High Speed ​​Camera, equipped with special parts for Stainless Video Shooting and a modified battery.
Magyar began experimenting with scanning in 2003. “I wanted to get out of the ordinary photo frame,” he said. - I remember that I did not sleep much. I sat out all night thinking how to do it. ” In his early experiment, Magyar assembled his own primitive scanner using an East German slide projector that threw a narrow beam of light. Then he built a platform of Lego cubes, which allowed this beam to "scan" the object, slowly sliding from top to bottom. A conventional SLR camera saved all the scanned lines at one time, collecting one image from them during one minute exposure. Thus, the scanner cut a minute of time into thin sections, and the camera collected sections back, creating one image from all these moments. Magyar scanned itself, experimenting with different movements, which created distorted final images. “When I turned around, the resulting image showed my body wrapped in a corkscrew,” he says. - It was an interesting technological experiment, but only. I abandoned him for several years. ”
Nevertheless, he was still admired by the idea of ​​shooting different parts of one person or several people at different times, creating a still image of “small pieces”, as Madiyar himself says. This coincided with his growing interest in what he calls the “ever-changing nature of the present”, the constant flow of life that did not succumb to attempts at a simple visual display.
In 2006, when he spent several months in Shanghai, he had an insight. “I had the feeling that I would, so to speak, scan the stream of people. I started looking for places of the right type where people would go at the same speed. ” First, Magyar studied the escalators in the malls of Shanghai. Then his gaze fell on the city streets, in particular, large intersections or bus stops with a constant stream of people. As soon as a concept appeared in his mind, he began to develop the technology to implement it. “It was a continuous study,” he says. “I spent a few weeks before I figured out all the details.”
The answer, as Magyar understood, lay in a modified version of the slit camera, which is used to shoot photo-finishes on racetracks and at Olympic competitions, recording the sequence of time in one image. Such cameras were rare and cost many thousands of dollars, so Magyar decided to make it himself. He connected the lens from the medium format camera to another sensor and wrote a program for the new device. Total cost: 50 dollars. He turned the traditional method of scanning inside out when the sensor moves along a fixed object. This time, the sensor will remain in place while the scanned objects move, photographed by a strip of one pixel width (this is the main principle of the camera for a photo finish). Magyar mounted the device on a tripod in a crowded area of ​​Shanghai and scanned pedestrians passing in front of the sensor. Then he combined over 100,000 consecutive lines of high-resolution photography on a computer.
An enlarged fragment of Urban Flow (# 424) , shot in Hong Kong on a self-assembling version of the slit camera.
As a result, Urban Flow appeared, a series of 30 cm high prints and 2.5 meters in length, which captured the parade of humanity marching through time. Those on the right walked past the sensor about two minutes ahead of those who were far left. “Every little fragment is a present, and all these pieces of the present come together to tell you a story,” Magyar explains. “By the time we see the story, it’s like a memory: it’s already gone.”
The eerie distortions of motionless objects and objects in motion remind viewers that they are looking at a graphic image of time, not of space. Quickly traveling buses were compressed into cars like Smart. Buses slowly stretched out like passenger planes. Slow-trousers appeared in slow-moving people, the feet stretched out like skis or became narrow, like Oscar Pistorius composite prostheses. And because of the curious features of scanning technology, everyone was moving in the same direction. “The horizontal axis does not reflect space, it does not mean left and right, but earlier and later,” he says. “If two people cross a pixel at the same time, it will look as if they are walking together.”
Urban Flow is perceived at the same time as a comedic and with a bit of melancholy, as a vision of human destiny and mortality that distorts time and consciousness. The choice of black and white display was made after a long deliberation. “I experimented with color, but people looked like color confetti, which was not my goal,” Magyar says. - This is not a carnival, for me it is something sad. We are all moving to the same destination, and it’s like death. ”
An enlarged video of Urban Flow (# 292) , shot in 2007 in Hong Kong, shows an incredible level of detail when viewed close up.
Lars Torkul, a design engineer living in Shanghai, met Madyar in China and came to his Shanghai apartment to see the process of working on a new project. “This place shocked me with its appearance,” recalls Torkul. “You had to squeeze past water bottles and other things into and out of the room to get to the table.” After Torkul saw a hastily assembled prototype for shooting, Magyar showed the first shots of the Urban Flow series on his computer screen. “I was delighted with the beauty and clarity of images,” says Torkul. “I said,“ Adam, this is unbelievable, are you going to show it? ”But he didn’t even think about it ... There were so many technologies that he hadn’t worked with before. He said: “These are still far from finished works.” I answered: “What are you talking about? They may be ready very soon! ”
Torkul introduced Magyar to his friend, the French artist Thomas Scharvery, who had just opened the Island6 gallery in a converted warehouse in Shanghai’s artists quarter. Slotted photos of Magyar fascinated and Sharvery, and he proposed to organize an exhibition. Magyar sold almost all of a dozen or so works that he printed for the exhibition - at a reasonable price from $ 700 to $ 1,400 - and received orders for a few more. Magyar was struck by the fact that his work generally had a commercial value: “I returned to Hungary, but I knew that on the basis of this I needed to start doing something.”
“In Zen Buddhism, you can train for five years before you make the first bow shot. And it accurately describes what Adam does. Time does not exist for him. ”
His next major project was Stainless , shot inside the metro stations of big cities such as Paris, Tokyo and New York. It was a qualitative leap forward. He was able to buy a high-quality industrial camera and a slit scanner device, designed for high-resolution imaging of printed circuit boards, bottles and other objects moving rapidly along assembly lines, in order to detect micro-cracks and other defects that cannot be detected with other types of cameras. The slit camera obtained by him uses one row of light-sensitive sensors to continuously scan objects moving at high speed, removing almost all distortions.
Stainless deliberately reminds us of theoretical physics, in particular, it refers the viewer to the mental experiments of Albert Einstein.The Magyar fixed camera, aimed at a moving train, echoes Einstein's hypothesis that “remote simultaneity” —the idea that two spaced events occur at the same time — is not absolute, but depends on the coordinate system of the observer. In the famous thought experiment, Einstein imagined two observers - one standing inside a moving train car and the second one standing on the platform when this train passes by - who perceive the same flash of light at the moment when their paths intersect. The passenger of the train sees that the light hits the front and back of the train at the same time, the motionless observer sees that the light reaches these points at different times. Similarly, Magyar distorts time and shows the subjectivity of human perception:his slit camera transforms a moving spot into a frozen image of impossible clarity and stillness, into a reality that is not perceived either by the passengers arriving at the station or by those who are waiting for the train on the platform. People in his trains travel together, but at the same time separately, lost in their own thoughts, often hypnotized by their mobile devices.
“You start to pay attention to how these people interact with their devices, and how little they interact with each other,” says Hannah Frizer, former head of Light Work. However, these ghostly images can also be seen as a triumph of human society, which Magyar began to appreciate more when he traveled the world. Belt passengers who hold the metro in Paris, Shanghai, Hong Kong, New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, Rome and Berlin all find striking similarities in appearance, facial expression and attitude to others, which overcomes cultural and geographical differences. In her notes to the exhibitions of works, Madjar Frizer drew a clear line between street photography of recognized masters, such as Diane Arbus, Gary Winogrand and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and how Madyar makes her photos.“The life he chronographs consists of ordinary people, not the most beautiful, eccentric, and poor, who usually attract the attention of photographers,” she wrote. “They were looking for differences, while Magyar finds similarities.” They moved through the city, while Magyar remained still and waited for people to pass by his camera ... He visits all new cities in different countries and on different continents until the features common to all mankind begin to appear. ”while people pass by his camera ... He visits all new cities in different countries and on different continents, until the features that are common to all mankind begin to appear. ”while people pass by his camera ... He visits all new cities in different countries and on different continents, until the features that are common to all mankind begin to appear. ”
Photos from the Stainless seriesalso showed the most impressive example of Magyar's tireless perfectionism. He desperately wanted to shoot in the Tokyo subway - “an incomparable subway system, an incomparable urban environment” - but the subtle blinking of lighting led to overexposed and underexposed frames that looked like vertical lines on his images. Magyar's solution: he spent the whole week traveling the subway with an exposure meter, measuring the level of illumination at all 290 stations. “I found five stations where the light was high-frequency, so I could start working there,” he recalls. “But inside the train, the light was still bad, so I spent three months creating a program that allowed us to get rid of these lines.” Magyar faced another problem when he was forbidden to work with a tripod in the New York subway system. He had to take it off his hands,which made the image even more distorted. He had to spend a few more weeks writing the code that eliminated them. Lars Torkul, a German design engineer, compares him to a Zen master. “In Zen Buddhism, you can train for five years before shooting a bow for the first time. This accurately describes what he does, Torkul told me. - Time does not exist for him. He lives and does his job clearly and in detail, just like in his images. ”- Time does not exist for him. He lives and does his job clearly and in detail, just like in his images. ”- Time does not exist for him. He lives and does his job clearly and in detail, just like in his images. ”
Stainless #7649
Shortly after the completion of Stainless , Magyar began to think about moving to moving images. After several months of research, he convinced the German manufacturer Optronis to lend him one of the high-end industrial video cameras that cost $ 16,000. Such cameras are used to shoot crash tests, study robotic manipulators, and even to analyze the movement of the hooves of horses participating in show jumping tournaments. Using high sensitivity and sophisticated software for analyzing TimeBench, the Optronis camera captures high-resolution images at an incredible speed: up to 100 thousand frames per second - for comparison, an ordinary movie camera shoots at 24 frames per second.
Magyar Flips Stainless Conceptupside down: now instead of standing on the platform, taking pictures of passengers rushing past, Magyar is located inside a moving car, recording video of motionless people on the platform, while the train enters the station with the camera. The ghost of Einstein again penetrates these images, and he again distorted time: Magyar was shooting video at a speed 56 times faster than normal, turning the 12-second blurred station views into 12-minute films, tormented by its slowness. Its passengers are standing together, but separately, with the refined, three-dimensional grace of the statues - only a bend of the lips or an elongated finger in the direction of the iPhone suggests that these people were captured in a super-slow shooting, stuck in a lasting moment. Magyar extracts feelings from a scornfully small moment of time. "I want to capture what“What’s happening in milliseconds, the origin of which you don’t even realize,” he told me. - I stretch the moments - the present, now - because, as humans, we live only in the past and the future. But the only existence that we have is now, and we do not even take this into account. ”
Breathtaking video clarity Series Stainless- it is also the result of the most complex software code that he ever had to write. In his experiments with industrial cameras, Magyar discovered that the quality of the image was ideal for measuring speed, distance and volume, but not quite suitable for the needs of the artist. He wrote sophisticated programs to improve the quality of images taken in low light and poor contrast. Another problem was digital noise - vertical, horizontal, lines and other random distortion, a typical problem with highly sensitive digital sensors. He spent almost two years intermittently, developing programs to reduce noise, solving one problem and immediately facing another. “Engineers don't have to work on this, but I have to. I can not sleep. I have been working on this for months and not stopping.When I meet a new problem, I have to find a solution. ”
A couple of days after our first meeting, I arrange to meet with Madyar at Alexanderplatz, one of Berlin’s most crowded underground stations, to show his Stainless project.. I arrive at the peak hour and wait ten minutes on one side of the platform filled with people, until it appears. His long hair is spread over a black park, which is complemented by black boots, black jeans and a black backpack. In a backpack, Magyar wears his modified Optronis camcorder and laptop. Four cables, blue and black, protrude from his backpack. He says volumetric equipment makes him feel like a “Ghostbusters hero.” After his encounter with the police at Union Square, Magyar modified the equipment so that it could be carried in a backpack, but in my opinion, the new layout is even more suspicious. Six aboveground and three underground lines converge on Alexanderplatz, creating a constant stream of people all morning. “I’m looking for a place where there are no gaps in a crowd, and the more people, the better,” he tells me.“In each city there are only a couple of places where you can catch such a crowd, and this is one of them.”
Together with Magyar, we jump onto the train and drive one station to the Rosa Luxemburg square, then go over the platform and take the next train to Alexanderplatz. In a filled wagon, the Magyar gets the unit out of its backpack. The gray aluminum frame of the camera, connected to the viewfinder, the handle and the cables that connect the device to his laptop, looks like a prototype rolled up in a garage. When he points the lens at the window, the red and green lights flash. “They always ask me:“ Did you do it yourself? ”,” He says to me while people around are watching with curiosity. After a few minutes, we roar into the station with a crash, and Magyar begins recording. After twelve seconds, everything is ready.
We stand and wait four minutes until eight gigabytes of new data are copied to his laptop (during such trips he usually takes two external hard drives onto which three terabytes of data can be written). Magyar studies a procession of beautifully lit faces that he took from a 12-second blur, and says he is pleased. To get results that suit him, he shoots hundreds of hours of video. In one of his favorite clips in the series, filmed in Alexanderplatz in 2011, by happy coincidence, two little girls running skipping across the platform in the background. Their graceful movements contrasted with the stillness of people in the foreground - an unexpected reminder that the image in front of the viewer is not a photograph, but a stretched moment - Magyar calls it "intertime". "These girls have become a real gift for me,"- he says.
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Squares , , 2007-2008. , , .
Of the many disciplines that Madiar had to deal with in his work, marketing was the most difficult. He got into the world of art by chance, and in the early stages of his career was puzzled by how this business works. “It’s not very pleasant to live with the naivete of a 20-year-old when you are 35,” he admitted a couple of days later when we were driving through Berlin to his workshop in the luxurious Savigny-Platz district on a rainy evening. Magyar was going to send several prints of Urban Flow to an art exhibition in Miami Beach. “I started doing this at the worst time - 2008, 2009 - when the art market collapsed,” he says. Five years have passed since that moment, and Magyar now receives significantly more money for his work - up to $ 14,000 for a Stainless print, - but it is still unpleasant for him to engage in business connections and self-promotion, which are necessary for development. “He has no commercial instincts,” says Lars Torkul.
However, Magyar learns. He became a more confident and convincing speaker, organically weaving together the conceptual and technological aspects of his work. This year, for the first time, he was able to live only on the income from art. His work has been exhibited in galleries from Harvard University to Budapest. In February, his work will be shown as part of an exhibition of three artists of urban life in the prestigious Julie Sol gallery in Manhattan. The exhibit will include Stainless Video and several prints from his Squares series.("Squares"), created between 2006 and 2009: photos of hundreds of people taken from pedestrian bridges, then joined together in Photoshop into imaginary city squares taken from a bird's-eye view. “I have nothing to complain about,” Magyar says.
Magyar is planning a future installation in the gallery, where he will project several videos onto the big screens surrounding the audience, and accompany the video with ominous sound effects - slow down squeal of brakes, background sound of the subway station. “Sometimes people tell me that when they watch a video, they think of death. It's a bit like getting out of the body, ”he says. Andrew Zolli is executive director of Pop Tech, an organization that brings together innovators in art and science. After he encountered the work of Magyar, he invited the artistmake a speech at the Pop Tech conference in Camden, Maine. He has a different look at this work. “His works say that we are alive,” Zolli insists, “that the world is an even more vibrant place than we imagine.” In any case, life or death, Magyar enjoys any reaction: “What could be better for an artist than this? This is an incredible feeling when you can do what others think about. And when this happens, I'm really happy. "
The author is Joshua Hammer . Editors - Mark Horowitz , Tim Heffernan . Fact Check - Hilary Elkins. Photo - Andreas Chudovski . Translation - Yuri Karabatov.
PS: More photos of the cameras and works of Adam Magyar in the article “ Bending Time ”.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/208820/
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