Gabor Kerekes, the Alchemist

Graphis, May/Jun 2002 by Rexer, Lyle

"That is my inspiration."

Lyle Rexer didn't even like Gabor Kerekes's photographs the first time he saw them. "They were strange and eccentric, the scientific equipment especially reimnded me of something from the Bride of Frankenstein," he remarks. "The only thing I could think of was Frederick Sommer's work. It was the fact that I couldn't place them or explain them that got my attention." These photographs (pg. 118) introduced Rexer to the world of contemporary Hungarian photography, which he wrote about for The New York Tines. They also led to a meeting with Kerekes, Sandor Szilagyi and several other photographers at the Hungarian Consulate in NewYork in 1998. Kerekes himself delivered a lecture to an audience of scarcely half a dozen people on the history of Hungarian photography. He began not with the birth of photography but with the early history of Hungary itself. "Even with Sandor translating, I couldn't quite understand it all:' Rexer says, "but I understood an approach that rooted photography not in technical developments but in national consciousness and in the penchant for metaphysical speculation. In my own thinking, I have been looking for a practice that night recover the grandeur of the single image and the practice of photography as such. For me, Kerekes is one answer."