Gàbor Ösz (1962)
Photographer Gábor Ösz finds his subjects in the landscape, or rather, in the history of a landscape. And he captures them using the oldest method of photography known to man: the camera obscura technique. In this technique, daylight is projected into a darkened space through a single, tiny opening onto photographic paper. The size of the image is determined by the space, and the contrast by the long exposure time. And because there is no negative, every photo is unique. With this method, Ösz connects interior and exterior, architecture and environment, public space and closed space.
Ösz made his name with The Prora Project (2001-2002), a series of photographs taken in a Nazi-built 'wall' of rooms with a view to the sea, on the northern German island of Rügen (1936-1939), intended to be a future vacation resort for the new Germany but never completed. The five-storey complex was to be five kilometres long, with space for 20,000 holidaymakers. Ösz photographed the identical view from the rooms. During the same period, the artist was also working on The Liquid Horizon (1998-2002), portraits of the sea taken from the Atlantic Wall, a line of bunkers along the Dutch, Belgian, French and Danish coast.
