Playing with Decay – Interview with László Lugosi Lugo

In our interview we introduce a photographic artist, László Lugosi Lugo, who has recognised how important it is, for himself and for the wider world, to digitise his work of four decades so far.

What do a graffiti writer leaving his mark everywhere and the way we want to preserve our cultural values have in common? What does an artist create who is interested in transience? And what does he do with the many thousands of pictures he has taken in his life? How does a diary from youth become a treasure of cultural history after 40 years? We talked to the photographic artist László Lugosi Lugo, whose life's work is almost entirely about the meeting of “then” and “now”.

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You're in full swing, I hear. What are you working on now?

I'm racing along an extraordinary number of motorways, parallel with myself. With the best racing cars in the world, and I want to get ahead of myself. I'm thinking at an international level. On the one hand I want to make books. My book Budapest Then and Now, for which I rephotographed György Klösz's former photographs, was published in 2001. But back in 1996 I had already made 40 trial shots for it, and I immediately started looking for a publisher. It took 4 years to find one. In the end Vince Publishers dared to take it on, and they didn't regret it. They sold 60,000 copies of it in 10 years. It proved an excellent gift item; people liked it.

“Sometimes I take photographs with a mobile phone as well. This self-portrait was taken in the toilet of a petrol station in Austria while I was photographing the Danube series. Unidentified location.”

Now I want to do the same project along the Danube and at several other locations too. In China, India, Russia, North and South America. I would like, for example, to travel the whole length of the Silk Road and photograph what it is like at this moment. I'm looking for a producer for these right now. In addition, I'd like to be present in art galleries as well, along the lines of photography as an art object. But I don't long for success, I long for movement. After all, because of my alcoholism, which I have by now overcome, ten years dropped out of my life, in every respect. For example, I have no presence on the internet either – I have only just started to build it. When my old website was made twenty years ago, we did not yet know what it was really for.

“This is one of the key images of my series on the changes in Budapest. One summer Saturday morning I was taking precisely this picture (with the Gandolfi) when the mayor of the district appeared in this secluded, lonely place cut off from the world. I took the opportunity and asked for the mayor's mobile number. Since then the mayor has always answered my calls and has helped enormously with the work.”

What is a website for?

To bring in work, create contacts, show a continuous presence and provide a market – I would like to sell pictures on it as well. I am planning a very wide-ranging presence: there will be a website, alongside it an Instagram page, a blog and Facebook, all of it linked together.

You put it that you are racing along in the best racing cars in the world. What did you mean by that?

My approach is special, and I can carry it out with assured quality. By the way, I realised only recently that since I was very young I have had the same outlook, the same thing interests me: transience. At the age of 17 I asked the best-looking girl in the class to let me photograph her. She said yes. Whereupon I took her to Budafok, to a collapsed house, and photographed her there, among the ruins. The best-looking girl in the class... And ever since, to this day, I have been drawn to decay: that is what I photograph, with great intensity and to a high standard.

So that at least in a photograph what is going to vanish from the world remains. So that a visible trace remains that it once existed. My professors, from whom I learned this: Eugen Atget, August Sander, Richard Avedon. And I also have a fictional master, Kathleen Hale from Three Days of the Condor. I have a book in the works whose protagonists they will be. I already have the publisher for it, Pauker Collection.

So you want to immortalise what is perishable. How?

In an anachronistic way. 1 billion 300 million digital photographs go onto the internet every day, and I come along with the wooden camera... And at a location I press the button only once, and make a black-and-white negative at 4x5. Over the past half year I have photographed 400 locations in Budapest and 1,500 graffiti. I get around to a great many places.

“I took this picture with the Gandolfi on 4x5 FOMA 100 sheet film (http://www.foma.cz/en/catalogue-fomapan-100-classic-detail-406). We see the entrance of a scrap-metal depot (MÉH-telep) under demolition in a Budapest suburb. Because of the poor quality of the film, one has to expose at 50 ASA instead of the nominal 100 so that there is detail in the shadows. Only after developing and scanning the negative did it turn out that the picture is about solitude and loneliness.”

And how do you get to them?

Partly I research the locations methodically, partly I come across them by chance while wandering around. I look for interiors, old shops from the sixties, for example a tailor's workshop, a bookshop, an amateur-radio shop. Now, for example, I'm going to photograph ruined factories, because those too will disappear. Recently I was wandering in outer Ferencváros, where I had never been in my life, and I saw an empty factory. I went into the Ferencváros Local History Collection (Ferencvárosi Helytörténeti Gyűjtemény) and asked them to recommend someone who knows the places.

So you don't just look at the sight, you also look into its history afterwards.

Of course! Sometimes I get my information only from the internet, but I like to look into things more deeply too. I'm also in intensive contact with the locals. I've started a series on homeless people, and I talk with them a lot as well. The blog will be about these stories.

What do you photograph with? What is the “wooden camera”?

The wooden camera is a Gandolfi. I bought it for myself for my 40th birthday. I always get the best presents from myself! Before that I used a Linhof Kardan camera, 4x5, but it was hard to move around. I did lug it up church towers all the same. The Gandolfi has three lenses, 75, 150 and 240, and twenty sheet-film holders. I also have a digital system, with four lenses, from 16 to 200, plus a macro. I never had the best cameras, only the bottom of the professional category. I don't need better. It doesn't have to be made of titanium, because I'm not going to Antarctica to take photographs, and I don't want to take even 40 pictures a second.

“Somewhere in Budapest (on Rákóczi út) I'm just busy setting up the Gandolfi. I haven't mounted the lens on it yet.”

When do you use the wooden camera, and when the digital?

The subject decides what's needed. I use sheet film, for example, when I want to record what I see rather than intervene in it. On digital images I often make changes in post-production. Recently, for example, I pushed the Danube together so that it wouldn't be too wide... But then, in the old analogue days too, we constantly tampered with images, only we didn't have as many options. In my view there is no subject that can be done only with a digital camera, but it does simplify the work. For example, lately I've started using filters reminiscent of 19th-century wet collodion for my still lifes. And it isn't even true that digital is faster – if I want to do it properly, it is sometimes slower. But both ways of photographing are an equally good game. An adventure.

Play and decay....

The subject is not playful, but doing it is. And what surprises I come across along the way, what gifts I receive! On All Saints' Day, for example, I went to Rákóczi út to photograph a graffito that had been scribbled up the week before. I started shooting with my digital camera, when a homeless man came up to me and asked for money. I gave him 500 forints and asked if I could take a picture of him. I took out the wooden camera, which happened to be in my car, and made the portrait. Meanwhile I noticed that he had something in his hand: a sketch of a graffito on paper! Graffiti writers, you see, make sketches before they spray the picture on the wall. I asked who he got it from. He told me; now I'm tracking that girl down. I would very much like to make portraits of the graffiti writers. They of course don't like being photographed, although by now I've developed a good relationship with them. They do the scribbling out of rebellion and rivalry. Their aim is for their tag to be on the walls all over the city. There is no self-expression in it, they don't regard it as art.

“This scribble was made by one of my favourite graffiti writers somewhere in Budapest. At first I thought I saw a face on the right (eye, nose, mouth) and, as a whole, a flying magic carpet, because I believed that graffiti writers smoke constantly and fly high. When I later met the writer in person, the drawing was deciphered. These are letters, because graffiti is ALWAYS about letters (the tag, the name), the writer says, and depicts nothing. I'm not giving the name now, because graffiti writers are constantly running from the police and this would put evidence in the police's hands. We avoid the police. The flat of my writer friend was searched recently; their camera and computer were seized.”

Self-assertion, not self-expression.

Leaving a mark. I asked them to do it on artist's canvas, but they didn't want to. Their aim is to build up a rebellious subculture. A fascinating world, outsiderdom, anarchy. Hands freeze in winter as they spray, they sleep under the train so the police won't find them. In my view, photographing them and their graffiti is just as much a recording of cultural heritage as if I were photographing paintings.

Culture does not consist only of high culture but also of the everyday. Indeed, mainly of that... Your old photo diary has great cultural-historical value in both senses. Would you tell us about it?

For 30 years I didn't even take the Diary out. I wasn't interested in what value it had – I was simply ashamed of how embarrassing it was. Which is true, but it no longer bothers me. What you can see in it is a twenty-five-year-old boy searching for what to do with his life, but not finding it, and meanwhile chasing women with enormous effort, yet terrified of them. A dreadful story, but I own it now.

How many years did you keep the Diary?

Four years, from 1978 to 1982.

Then you must have outgrown that state in the meantime...

Well, no.

Who is the Diary about?

About my immediate circle at the time, members of my family and my friends. That was my film period, at the Béla Balázs Studio. I always had some camera on me. If you had come towards me in the street then, or if we had sat down to drink this coffee, I would have taken a picture of you. I took a few every day, developed them, and made enlargements of them on the smallest photographic paper of the time, 6x9 cm. I glued them into notebooks and wrote text underneath. Who, where, when, what, why... That is how the Diary was made. Those around me knew about it.

“A page of the Diary during the digitisation at Tripont. The digitisation was done with a Phase One camera (https://www.phaseone.com), which is capable of extraordinary performance. The original pictures on the page were taken in New York on the Westway, with an old Leica IIIf camera, in 1981. I already knew the Westway from Wim Wenders's film The American Friend. And I wanted to see it live. By then, in 1981, there was no traffic on it, and it was later demolished (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Side_Highway). Gábor and I threw together a bit of lecsó (a Hungarian vegetable stew), and went to have a look.”

But everyone kept a diary back then. For example, Mihály Korniss came up with the Collective Diary (Kollektív napló). If I remember correctly, it was made in 3 copies. People then between 20 and 30 passed it around among themselves. Korniss passed it on to Péter Nádas, Nádas handed it over to Ferenc Kőszegh. Ákos Birkás and Lenke Szilágyi also kept diaries independently. I came up with the photo diary, and András Szirtes immediately started his film diary. I was inspired to do the photo diary by Sándor Kardos's Hórusz Archive, his private photo collection. I even wrote a foreword and an introduction to it, by hand, in red ink, because I was a person with a humanities bent.

And why did you stop?

I got bored and it ran out. Towards the end I no longer wrote texts. I also stopped teaching English when I realised that I was no longer preparing for my lessons but doing it out of routine. The diary then moved with me from flat to flat in cardboard boxes, and spent the last 10 years in storage. Sometimes the thought of throwing it out even crossed my mind, but the mass, the weight, wouldn't give in.

And how did it come to light now?

Several people thought of it, for example András Bán and Can Togay. Last year a few pages were even put on display in the Photo Salon (Fotószalon) at the Műcsarnok (Kunsthalle Budapest). In the end I decided to reproduce the whole diary. Tripont offered that I use their Phase One for the photography. The digitisation took place. There I learned what a good thing it is to shoot tethered. I even bought the software for it. I still have a little to do with the pictures, for example I need to number them and reduce them in various formats, because the size is now 610 GB in RAW. We're talking about forty volumes, 6,000 pictures, approx. 900-1000 pages. With around 1000 people appearing in it. At first I wanted to put the whole material on the internet. I wanted to make a list of names of the people appearing, and for each of them I would have listed their known works, the more important personal information, their website, etc. The Diary features, for example, my favourite singer, Nico. I wanted to list the links to all of her records. It would have been like a little Facebook. So that the people appearing could then start corresponding and communicating with each other...

“Nico's concert at the Squat Theatre in New York in 1981, from the Photo Diary. Nico (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nico) spent practically all her time in the Squat, because that's where she got her heroin. Nico was one of my favourite singers, and still is. At the time there were no sales at the Squat; instead they rented the hall out to bands such as the then-beginner DNA or the Lounge Lizards. Gábor and I often went there to Péter and the others, and enjoyed the music.”

One thing is certain: a heated correspondence would develop, but not only in a good sense.

Exactly. Because of personality rights it can't be done. I would have to talk to everyone individually to get permission. For those who are no longer alive, I would have to track down their heirs as well. So in the end I gave up on that idea.

So what will its fate be?

According to János Kurdy Fehér it is a fundamental work of cultural history. I will put 30-40 selected pages on the internet, for which the personality-rights questions can be clarified, and I'll add alongside that the whole material is accessible for scientific research purposes at the Historical Photo Department of the Hungarian National Museum or in the Budapest Collection of the Metropolitan Ervin Szabó Library. I had already taken my photographs to these two institutions earlier.

But my aim is not to shelve my pictures. One of the motorways I am racing along right now is precisely the processing of the past: I will scan my old work, the negatives. I am only now beginning to learn scanning in its depths. I would like to move into the digital world in every respect, and I will bring my old works in there too. The urge in me to get to know my new life – and with it the old one – is very strong. Especially since I have been given a muse as a gift for it.

You are now busy with digitising your negatives and pictures. What are your experiences?

I started processing my old things with the Szén (Coal) series. I made these pictures on 9x12 black-and-white sheet film in 1993. It was relatively well exposed and developed material, on Kodak films. At first I thought the whole lot had to be scanned, but a good-quality scan at such a resolution takes about 3-4 minutes. The series consists of around a hundred pictures, and that would have been a lot of time. So I made a mask out of black cardboard on a light table so that light wouldn't hit the optics, and using a macro lens I photographed all the negatives with my full-frame Nikon 610 camera. Afterwards I would still have had to turn them round into positives, but then came Tripont's offer to do the whole thing again with the Phase One. At first I didn't want to redo the work, because I thought it was a waste of time. But we made a test of one of the sheet films, and the result was virtually flawless. In tones and richness of detail the Phase One image outdid many times over the otherwise by no means bad first full-frame version.

“The digitisation of the Photo Diary is under way at Tripont. We shoot in tethered mode (http://www.diyphotography.net/introduction-tethered-shooting/) with the help of Capture One software, in order to achieve the optimal result. The orange cable connects the camera to the computer. I took this photograph with the panorama setting of my mobile phone.”

What differences did you notice?

Let's compare the digitisations of one of the negatives from the Szén series. The brownish-toned one was made with a full-frame 24 MP camera, the grey one with a Phase One 80 MP medium format. The full-frame detail is a 200% enlargement of the original, the Phase One detail a 100% enlargement. The differences can be observed mainly in places rich in detail (fence) and in the richness of the tones (paving). The greater part of the richness of detail comes from the difference in resolution. A negative of this size contains enough detail information to justify the higher resolution. And the richness of tones comes from the difference in dynamic range between the two technologies, the difference being nearly tenfold.