'a joke dancing over catastrophes'


  • Photographer
    Julianna Nagy
  • Prize
    Honorable Mention
  • Date of Photograph
    2009
  • Technical Info
    Digital and Zeiss Box Tengor

It all started with a conversation about my dad in the middle of the night at a bus stop in the city of London. ‘That’s your project, that’s what you have to do’. After that I had no choice, it choose me. It fell on me with perfect timing like it had been hovering over me waiting till all the pieces of my life came together and then it was my burden. The story of how my father escaped from communist Hungary. *Attributed to Hungarian writer Tibor Déry

Story

“It all started with a conversation about my dad in the middle of the night at a bus stop in the city of London. ‘That’s your project, that’s what you have to do’. After that I had no choice, it choose me. It fell on me with perfect timing like it had been hovering over me waiting till all the pieces of my life came together and then it was my burden. The story of how my father escaped from communist Hungary.”

This was my introduction to ‘a joke dancing over catastrophes*’ my final project for my Masters program in documentary photography. It began as a retracing of my father’s 1973 escape to Italy but ended with me. I found myself writing about my childhood and what the story had meant to me. Completing the trip in Latina, Italy standing outside the refugee camp that he had lived in for over a year I felt that I had conquered something. This larger then life story of my fathers’ was now not his alone.

*Attributed to Hungarian Writer Tibor Dery

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