Your Countenance I Seek - Photographs by Ferenc Olasz

The sacred memorials standing along the roadsides are still capable of fulfilling their original purpose, their spiritual function even today – they halt the passer-by, bring quiet and inspire reflection. The crosses and statues in cornfields, at the boundary of villages, on vineyard hillsides, and in churchyards or cemeteries once populated the whole Carpathian Basin, but today they are gradually disappearing, their condition continuously deteriorating. Since the 1970s, Ferenc Olasz has been photographing the tangible relics of our spiritual heritage that still survive in areas inhabited by Hungarians.

He turned to photography as a young teacher, after completing his studies at the Teacher Training College in Eger and at József Attila University in Szeged. His intellectual curiosity was captured by his immediate surroundings. His first sitters were acquaintances and neighbours, the elderly inhabitants of Alsópáhok, followed by their houses and yards, and the stone crosses, tin Christs, and Virgin Marys at the edge of the village. It was from here that his photographic journey – which he regarded as a mission – unfolded. His work is not driven by a conscious documentary intent: he approaches the visual world intuitively, seeking to capture moods and emotions. Over six decades, his photographs and films have become vital records of values preserved in the final moments of a changing social and natural environment. By now, numerous religious folk customs have faded into oblivion and lost their original function of shaping communities or strengthening faith. Nevertheless, certain elements may still be discerned in some ecclesiastical practices. The survival of traditions is often linked to single small sacred relics, which not infrequently serve as the only remaining cultural heritage of a settlement, even becoming bearers of communal memory and identity.

The title of the exhibition – I seek your countenance – is a quotation from The Proslogion, the best-known work of the Italian-born Benedictine abbot Saint Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), which is at once a prayer and an expression of his desire to behold the face of God. Ferenc Olasz’s choice of this title is an apt self-definition of his own philosophically-underpinned search for God. Indeed, a natural description of his artistic activity. Every one of his photographs is a portrait in that it preserves something that makes present the one who is far away.

“I have recorded treasures that testify to a thousand years of Hungarian culture and forever remind us of the praise of God by (mostly) unknown masters. These artistic relics form part of universal culture, bearing the message of a people blessed with faith and talent: the Hungarians. My photographs are meditations… on faith, silence, the silence of the soul.”

Curator: Zsuzsanna Tulipán