AuthorZoltán Jókay

There is no way to describe reality adequately with the means of photography. Thus, there is nothing left to do, but to sweep up the better part of our efforts to find a language for what is, and also for what isn´t, in an effort to communicate with our fellow humans and to get in

This blog post  I wrote in the summer of 2012, seven years ago. Meanwhile I had abandonned this blog, 2019 I really got in trouble, because I was accused of spreading child pornography by German autho Over the years I had many short encounters with the books by Sally Mann. Standing in the bookstore, I

If you are suffering from dementia, living in a senior home in Germany will worsen your condition. If you have nothing to do, nobody to talk to, if everyday life is reduced to waiting for nothing but death, you will loose the rest of your mind and all your other capabilities for sure. 23. 07.2020

Anne Wilkes Tucker: When you say, “I’m making pictures to put in the drawer,” there is a kind of determination on your part to continue with what is in your particular eye when I’m sure there were dealers saying to you, “If you’d back off a little, it’d be easier to sell them.” Were there

Wolfgang Herrndorf was an successful illustrator and author. In February 2010 he was diagnosed a deadly brain tumor, in the summer of 2013 he committed suicide.Beginning on the 8th of march 2010 until his death the 26th of August 2013 Wolfang Herrndorf wrote a diary that he published on his website. His lines turned into

Francesca Woodman was only 22 years old when she put an end to her life. I am reluctant to charge her images by this doleful fact, because this is so much part of the cliché of the suffering genius, and a corny mystification of the prosaic job of working as an artist. There is nothing

By loading the video, you agree to Vimeo’s privacy policy.Learn more Load video Always unblock Vimeo 2003 I was invited to spend a month in a small German town. I was expected to produce during that time a work of art that would be presented in a “white cube” on one of the streets of

These people have lived about 70 years ago, around 1945. Sometimes the year when the photograph has been taken is scratched into the image, otherwise we couldn´t guess. If we don´t know anything about life in Romania at that time, we won´t know a lot more after having seen these images. We see burials, we

photograph byNikolay Bakharev Nikolay Bakharev´s images look like a bunch of amateur photographs found in an attic. Intimate bedroom moments, cute erotic photographs from a time before Internet was around, before pornographic images of all sorts were flooding the monitors of lonesome men in the need of some boring excitement. In between we see images

Sometimes I feel that photographers should forget about reality. If we made it to the safe shores of the successful form, more often than not the outcome of our efforts is nothing but a beautiful photograph. I have no problems with beauty in art, but if beauty is all we can achieve, why bother with

It belongs to my duties to visit Mrs Hunter. Two or three times a week I knock on her door and after a few steps in, through a short corridor, I usually detect her on her bed, lying on her stomach, her back turned towards me. Looks awkward, the way she lies there, her head

Regularly confronted with grief and death, pain and suffering, regularly confronted with ultimate loneliness, I still haven´t learned to believe, but I realize,that God is a necessity, even if he doesn´t exist. That´s why we had to invent him. God has been taken as an excuse for all kinds of abuse,for he is our creation.

I was  having a cigarette in the entrance are of the nursing home. Three seniors, all of them suffering from  of dementia, were sitting there along me. Nobody talked. We were just sitting there. Spring was in the air. Then the automatic door of the home opened. A lady came out, then a man in black,

I was asked by BILDKUNST.DE to delete the images by(these were the names spelled out) Loretta Lux,Man Ray,Valie Export,August SanderLotte Reiniger and every other artist represented by them or to pay a fee for publishing their images.They represent around 126 000 artists from around the world. All those beautiful images,by August Sander, and Lotte Reiniger,hard

I was asked by Bild-Kunst to delete all images by August Sander due to copyright laws, or to pay a fee for using his images on my blog.No money here, and no more images by August Sander on my blog. August Sander book was one of the first ones I bought, back in 1980.I didn´t

A frog, giving a concert. Oh, dear.

  Around six weeks ago, Elisabeth Osterhof was hospitalized.She had to leave her husband Franz Osterhof behind.The two of them had shared a flat located on the fifth floor of a senior home. Elisabeth´s husband Franz is a big, friendly guy, never passing anybody without a joke.Franz was a carpenter. He hands are really huge.

I am quite ashamed of myself. It´s just around a year ago that I realized that we are rapidly ruining our climate. This will have catastrophic consequences for all of us, for some sooner, for others a bit later. I am ashamed of myself, because I should and could have known better. I am deeply

Some memories and one regret. No school, no homework, no need to do anything. Hot summer days, playing cowboy and Indians, hide and seek between the bushes. Reading all day long, eating all I could get. My grandma baked every day a new cake, apple pies or plum cakes, dinner with wine, juicy ripe tomatoes

Austellungsdoku, “Longing to belong” 2017 Valparaiso, Chile     Ich bin weder Ungar, noch bin ich Deutscher. Ich bin zwischendrin. Die ersten Jahre meiner Kindheit bin ich in einer Siedlung für Flüchtlinge aufgewachsen. Das waren ordentliche Mietwohnungen bewohnt von Flüchtlingen aus Ostdeutschland, oder auch aus den ehemaligen deutschen Ostgebieten. Das weiß ich nicht, weil ich

In my childhood I survived an alcoholic depressive mother who committed suicide when I was a youth. I survived because there were moments of normality; I survived because I was living in a cultivated middle class family with my own room to hide and the possibility to forget about my surroundings burying myself into books.

  The following interview with me was led by Gianpaolo Arena somewhen in 2012. It was published in Landscape Stories. Looking back at this interview and the events of the last days, I experience a deep feeling of gratitude for all the help and sympathy I have received and still do receive.   “Fragments of

Sometimes I am suffocated by the limitations of photographers photography thus motivated to move to something different, to move to the wider spaces of art. I was in this state of mind two days ago when I stumbled over Isabelle Wenzel´s homepage  (via the sonic blog) While sending her a mail and wondering if an answer will

Charlotte Salomon was born 1917 in Berlin. She was transported to Auschwitz on 7 October 1943 and was probably gassed on the same day she arrived there. She was five months pregnant then, only permitted to live 26 years. She would have stayed anonym as most of the Jews, Sinti and Roma and homosexuals that

image by Mike Disfarmer Bonnie Dell Gardner,1943 The name of that unshaved man with the jug ears was Meyer until he decided, that he was thrown by accident into a family foreign to him. The Meyers were of german origin, a “Meier” being a farmer, so Mike Meyer, because he wasn´t a farmer, called himself

Diane Arbus with Doon, 1945 There is one asset of photography you will primarily notice while looking at images depicting your life: it opens the door for the intrusion of the past into the present. When I saw the left image of this sequence of two, I was reminded of a young woman, of her,

image by Billy Monk I am drawn back and forth between my immediate impulse to reject what I see and the discovery that I do share something with Billy Monks protagonists: I reject the dirt, the shabby surroundings, I reject the potential disrespect of women, I reject boozy ecstasy and I reject this lack of

source: These Americans. A heart touching and unbelievably charming sequence of photobooth images, found at These Americans and the Lost Gallery. Some of these people are sad, some coquettish, some lost in dreams, and most of the time the apparatus, the photo machine, seems to disappear, some kind of magic happens and we look into a face, and the

Yesterday our TV set died. Behind its bulky corpse, lost in time but not in space, I found some invitation cards I made for my diploma twenty years ago. I look at them now, and remember how I put up these self made cards on the walls and doors of my university, inviting my fellow

image by JH Engstrom An alcoholic sitting drunken in his urine, a demented senior yelling the remains of his brains out of his head, a junkie lying in the gutter, the homeless wearing dirty rags, an old bearded woman sitting depressed in the darkness of her messy home. It´s easy to photography all these people

For  one week now, Dr.Auberger doesn´t speak anymore. She doesn´t eat or drink  no more. On a coffee-table, an old book with poems by Heinrich Heine. It´s the only book in this last refuge of the old lady. I don´t know what to do for her. She doesn´t seem to be around anymore. I pick

image by Seiichi Furuya   The longer I am occupied with photography, the more tired I get tired of most of what I see. Again and again I find the iterations of the same photographic languages: photojournalism,the technically perfect American photograph, romantic images of Eastern Europe, intimate and direct photographs in grainy black and white,

image by Donigan Cumming “The Stage”   That Mr. Cummings photographs are staged is obvious and was never meant to be hidden. His images could be tagged as overdone, unrealistic and shocking. Additionally, normal middleclass citizens don’t know anything about what he is showing us in such a surreal manner. They don’t know anything about

When I was a kid, my parents were a secret to me. I loved them, and they loved me. (As if this would be that simple.) One of the dearest things for my mother was a facsimile of “the Bore notebook” by the Hungarian poet Radnóti Miklós. This little book fascinated me too, though I

image by Gerry Winogrand The image above accompanied me for a long time in form of a postcard. I just love the image.