photography in all its forms

“I am interested in showing alternative aspects of perceptions we have become accustomed to.” —Miklos Gaál

Miklos Gaál’s work was first brought to you by Aperture in reGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow (Aperture, 2005) and in the traveling exhibition of the same name. Aperture is now pleased to make available a limited-edition photograph from one of his series. A member of the Helsinki School, Gaál’s work involves of selecting the position of his camera at a long distance from the scene being captured, as is the case for the busy street scene featured in Avenida Presidente Antonio Carlos.

By playing with focal distances, Gaál turns scenes from everyday life into strange cardboard cut-outs. City traffic, sporting events, and parades are all transformed into scale models. His photographs, always taken from a distant and elevated viewpoint, are disturbing to look at: the fuzziness of some areas of the image creates the curious effect of miniaturization, giving viewers the impression of looking at an artificial, toy world. Only by continuing to look carefully at the image, orientated by the clearly focused areas of the picture, can viewers pass beyond this first impression and re-establish the truth. Gaál uses distance and blurriness as ways of making the represented scenes more remote and turning the tangible world into an unreal universe. These images skirt the realms of fiction, like the stories that children construct when they simulate the real world in miniature. As the artist states:

“I photograph and am interested in small scenes and moments of everyday life: work and leisure time, the built-up environment, and so on. When looking at these kinds of subjects through unorthodox photographs, one is invited to make an interpretation of one’s own. Even a tiny moment can tell a story, and a familiar scene can be looked at in a new and even surprising way. For me, a surprise can reveal something previously unseen, and it can therefore change my concept of what is around me and within me. All of a sudden, you have the sense that you feel and understand something intensely.”

Gaál is always trying to picture scenes that are populated because, says the artist, “if you lack human figures to give scale to the space, essentially you lack a motif and a surface for projecting oneself into the picture.”