1.6.-3.7.2011

Having started, together with a good friend, a voyage to photograph India,
Szamody Zsolt imposes upon himself a personal iconographical code, aimed at placing
him at an equidistant relation with both her splendors and her pauperism, somewhere
on the middle line between fascination and compassion. The choice of a certain
iconographical program is necessary for him in order to cross the first threshold, the
most tempting, but also the most frequented, of India’s seduction: her existential show.
The discovery and resonance with the voice of India beyond the clichés,
conventions and her immediate offer, requested that Zsolt deliberately selected two
different but complementary thematic routes.
One is the route of glances: full eye contact. The aim is the flashing instant when
one cognizes and recognizes the other. The capture of the glances discovers the Indian
spirituality through the rebound of metonymy: the part for the whole, the light of the eyes
for the light of the sky. Moreover, the freshness of the instant saves the image from the
wear of visual clichés, because the intersecting glances of the photographer and his
subjects create the key points of a visual route located beyond immediate perception,
somewhere in the off-shore. The fact that those unknown faces respond ingenuously
to the photographer’s, to the “stranger’s” challenge, and that traversing his look, they
also look in our eyes, projects Zsolt's India in a continuous present whose power of
suggestion remains just as active as a yantra.
The second route interprets India through her essential signs and rhythms,
placed on the verge of abstraction, but on this side of it, in the pulsating world of the
symbols that are still alive in India. The aim here is the instant when, through an image,
a certain something that pre-exists in any encounter is revealed, and that something,
though barely perceived, gives meaning to the presence or absence, to the hazard
or predestination, to the being or nonbeing. We are talking about a series of images
placed at the limit of a geometry of a coded vitality, a geometry of the essential rhythms
that expand all through the symbolical language. It’s the India that was defined as a
place of a sacredness hidden beyond some rough or only untamed images, minimally
articulated, just like some echoes of ancient hymns.