The Other Planet
Imaging the Past and the Future and the Desired

Expansion of the photo medium

Working with photography has been the central inspiration and starting point for my artistic work since the very start. Understanding photography as a medium opened the way for me to explore other mediums.
I inherited a collection of 2,500 glass negatives and sheet film negatives from my grandparents, who were enthusiastic amateur photographers. I have been standing by them in the darkroom since I was 4 years old and I was also involved in setting the scenes for their photos. This collection includes a wide variety of images: landscapes, nature photos, documentary, ethnographic footage, staged family photos, portraits, as well as choreographed theatrical, funny scenes, and classic live action footage. The pictures were enlarged and put in a photo album, but we always looked at the negatives, holding them up to the light of the lamp. From my early childhood, this collection of negatives represented for me the unarticulated past, the documentation of the unquestionable truth before interpretation or narrative reorganization – which was of course a false idea, because the act of photography is itself an interpretation. The shape of people, their mass, their movement, the interactions between them form a very complex system of what happened and what people only wished for but did not happen; of what is in the picture and what is not in the picture, what is lost. 
Perhaps this experience was the basis for the way I approach photography in my artistic work.
The photo genres listed above, from documentary photography to staged photography, involve the same act of rewriting the reality for me. By selecting the moment of the image and frame them from the multitude of the real sights, we rewrite reality, in the same way that our minds rewrite our memories, our virtual images, repeatedly according to the needs of our present life, our emotions, our dramas, in order to survive. 
The same process operates in the case of collective memory, as newer political and power systems attempt to rewrite historical memory, right down to manipulated photos of events, from which people and places disappear or are added as we can see in official photos of 20th century dictatorships.
This realization led me to manipulate and expand the photographic medium. For me, manipulating these negatives also meant changing the past. The illusion that I can rewrite my story, not only at the level of interpretation, but also in the realm of the unbroken mass of events. We can call it a healing process as well.
Elements added to the photograph, such as drawings, collages depicting movement and the passage of time, or the representation of characters missing from the photo or imagined there in the form of silk embroidery, represent the same value of reality as the photographed reality.
Only recently have I discovered the historical parallels to my work, in which I added my present self to the original glass negatives of my childhood. (Time Leap Light Box series) During World War I, the figure of a distant or deceased soldier's relative was copied onto the glass negative of a family photo, often as a white silhouette in the absence of his photo.
(The Hungarian Ethnographic Museum invited some pieces from my Time Leap series to their exhibition of these World War I glass negatives.)
Based on my works exhibited at Photo London in 2019, Michael Diemar writes about this creative process in iPhotoCentral magazine:
Over the last 10 years I have seen quite a few examples of photographers turning photographs into three dimensional objects by cutting into prints, bending the cut sections at an angle or adding layers of cut prints on top of one another. ... But Inda Gallery of Budapest showed examples that I found truly remarkable: two works by Marianne Csaky from her series Time Tunnel, images made in the homely, unglamorous setting of her own home. With cut-outs of silhouettes, one of a mysterious visitor and her herself, their shapes frozen in a series of movements as he leaves, the other as he arrives. These two works had more than a few resonances for me, such as Joseph Conrad's assertion that we can never truly know ourselves, as well as the opening lines in John Berger's book Ways of Seeing, published 1972: "The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.""
Michael Diemar, Photo London 2019. iPhotoCentral E-Photo Newsletter, Issue #251 6/10/2019.
https://iphotocentral.com/news/article-view.php/0/263/251/1655
Christoph Wiesner, the director of the Paris Photo 2019 also commented on my working method on French public television based on my solo exhibition presented in the Prismes section of ParisPhoto 2019. (France.TV/Télématin Antiquités) Paris Photo 2019, Prismes.

The Other Planet

The visual appearance of history filtered through personal stories has been always inspiring me. A very early experience of mine was that even the most innocent family story or love story cannot be understood without the historical and political context of the time. This is how, among other things, The Other Planet project came into existence.
During Covid curfew, I had the opportunity to watch hundreds of hours of archival films and photos of events that fundamentally defined the history of the 20th and the 21st century, this has been my great passion for years. I am particularly interested in the visual display of scenes that show recurring motifs, basic human behaviours, reactions, and relations between people throughout history. Those that can be understood and deciphered even without a precise knowledge of the events, like war, captivity, submission, power, escape, vulnerability, violence, manipulation, demagoguery, exploitation, hope, love, joy, empathy etc.
The Other Planet is a fantasy play about how our descendants will remember us, in 300 years in a world from where the Earth’s history can be observed not solely from the point of view of humans but also of all living creatures, animals, plants, and even of rocks and of the entire eco-system. Will they inherit our traumas, the consequences of all we did, still carrying them when the concrete faces and figures have long faded away and turned into silhouettes?
In the first series of the project each photo shows a major event in the 20th and 21st centuries based on archival footages in the form of embroidered black silk appliques over the landscapes of an imaginary planet.
The second part of The Other Planet project is based on fragments from news reels, news broadcasts, archive historical photos and archive films downloaded from the internet. I supplemented these scenes with charcoal drawings, making the animals active participants and sufferers of the depicted historical events.
The third part of the project focuses on the personal memory and the painful process in which we rewrite our memories according to the challenges of the present. These works are based on self-portraits, family photos and glass negatives from my family archive.