GABOR MURAY: LAYERS OF LONGING
After ten years as a journalist Gábor Muray needed a change. He left his job, slowed down, and returned to photography’s roots. We caught up with him to hear his story as he restarts his artist’s journey.
In the past two decades, photography has simply become too much, too loud, sensory overload bombarding the individual with insane amounts of pictures: a world consuming quantity rather than savoring quality. But, what about us? Photographers and enthusiasts alike, who want to capture and celebrate the fleeting moment, who still want to rejoice in every single picture? The need to slow down has never been more important. light, the moment, photography and pictures should be re-appraised and re-appreciated.
I spent the spring of 2013 in Nord-Denmark, not far from the rough, Nordic Sea in a small village. I quit my ten-year job at one of the biggest daily newspapers in Hungary. The only thing I wanted was to retreat into silence after all the stress of journalism and editing. I studied universal photographic processes for 5 months at a school in Denmark, and it was well worth it. I learned to appreciate pictures, which I labored for hours and hours to create, applying different processes such as cyanotype, bromoil painting, painting with light, etc.
After the semester ended and I returned to Hungary, I realized that, unfortunately, the proper conditions do not exist here to shoot film in everyday use. I’d read a lot of articles about different solutions, but finally, I settled on Replichrome I: Icon . It galvanizes life into sterile digital images, while retaining the picture and the mood I saw and felt at the moment of exposure. You can debate how digital graininess is similar to that of film grain, or the differences between Replichrome and the original Fuji 400H and Portra 400 tones. In my opinion, it’s not that significant. What really matters is that we can still seize the opportunity to create deeply layered pictures with natural effects - even without our film cameras. Create pictures that were conceived in the back of our eyes, and were born instantly in the process of photography.
