photography
Terence Bogue

Interview with Esther Gyorki - June 2013

Firstly, explain how you came to be a photographer.

It might sound simplistic, but I have always found a pencil elusive.
A photograph is easier. Mysterious, frustrating, annoying, intangible.
Maddeningly elusive - but still easier.
I was born in Brazil and was lucky to have had a childhood surrounded by natural beauty.
When I was 5 my sister let me borrow her camera, which our brother had let her borrow.
My father was kind enough to take this film off somewhere to be processed.
It came back sometime later as a set of black & white miniatures with wide borders
and deckle edges.
They seemed to me like large postage stamps, but I had a strange realization
that I had had a part in their creation.
Nothing much happened until I was 16 when I met the extraordinary Brazilian photographer
Otto Stupakoff. He was 28 and decades ahead of his time. He showed me some of the possibilities
and pointed me toward Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles.
I was there for two and a half years, before going to London, where I eventually managed a job with Adrian Flowers - an eccentric genius
who resembled Rasputin and held a contagious fascination for light. - He taught me to question.
Eventually I came to Australia and set up a small studio in South Melbourne in 1979.

Tell us about your series at BIFB'13.

For around 30 years I photographed work by some of the best artists in Victoria. Potters, Weavers, Glass Blowers, Painters, Silversmiths and Woodworkers.
All these photographs were of things. What really intrigued me though were the people who made them.
Extraordinary individuals who evolve & create extraordinary work in a painfully undernourishing society.
So I started to photograph some of them. That led me on to try and distill the beauty within us all.
This intangible Enigma that we are.

How do you see your work in a broader context, beyond BIFB'13.

We are a myriad of gestures hidden under many a façade. I find it heartening that many of those I have photographed have quite liked the person I have seen.

What do you hope is the lasting image or feeling that a viewer will experience after seeing your work?

I am always amazed by what others see in photographs. We all trundle around with a mound of baggage. All photographs will trigger memories good and bad.
I just search for elegance beneath a human cloak.

Who or what inspires you and influences your work?

My father gave me curiosity.
Otto Stupakoff & Adrian Flowers who I had the good fortune to meet.
Generosity who, like a Muse, comes knocking at my door when I least expect it.

Your work Enigma from 2012 is a really powerful and striking work.
Describe this work and what it means to you.

I have spoken at length about Enigma, Façade, Identity & Mystery.
I search for iconic qualities. I think this photograph might be getting close.
It clutches at many moods and sensual symbols.
It is a mask yes, but totally revealing - a vulnerable façade that shows confident strength.
Androgynous, yet the epitome of femininity.
Above all it personifies the enigma within gamine.
It allows us to identify, recognize & acknowledge.

You have said in the past that you "see a photograph as merely a trigger to our memory of substitution, where we perceive far more than we see".
Can you explain this concept further?

If I put it into context, it might explain things better -

Part of the fascination of photography is that it is such an unpredictable lie.
We can only interpret based on personal experience
and that experience is so subjective, so momentary,
that a strong photograph will produce
strong emotions that transcend the mere document.
As such it will always be the better for what is left out.

This is why I see a photograph as merely a trigger to our memory of substitution,
where we perceive far more than we see.