The Balkanita: The Depression A photo series in an old Hungarian tenement house

photo: Ildikó Szilágyi-Nagy, The Depression series, 1.

I am an admirer of old houses of any kind and I am so lucky that I posess a flat in an about a hundred year old tenement house in Budapest. This house doesn't have extraordinary architextural peculiarities, but it is tipical in Budapest. You can see the most spectacular tenement houses in Andrássy Road and they are rebuilt nicely. But most of our old houses are in shamefully degraded condition. We, who own a little flat (mine is 33 square meters) in such a house, constantly take new and new loans to catch up with the renovating neccesities which the predecessor owner neglected to make. The predecessor owner of these old houses was the former People's Republic of Hungary. The original owners? They were banished or killed in the storms of history.

photo: Ildikó Szilágyi-Nagy, The Depression series, 2.

I took this photo series in my flat, in 2009. I wanted to use the typical scenery of a Budapest house, I wanted to phase bars and limits. At that time I faced severe health difficulties, and I also wanted to express deep sedness and hopelessness. That is why I chose to summarize these feelings and visual effects into the topic of depression.

The most challenging for me was to decide if I should send a human fugure on stage or I should just settle for the scenery and objects. I used myself as a model, but I hadn't been satisfied with the expression on my face for a long time, and here came the good, strong Hungarian onion. Here we call it red onion (vöröshagyma). It smells so strong that it makes you not only cry when you peel it, but makes your eyes burn. I had to peel and cut just one, and I was happy with the distressed expression on my face in the photos. As I was annoyed by the thought of public display of my own crying face, I cut the picture in the nose using the mirror (see last photograph).

Before begining the shooting I had known I wanted to work in grayscale, with limited tones. I finalized the photos with less contrast and only little blacks, in a lustre archive paper.