George Eastman Hall

Portrait photography represents time lived through condensed into a picture. If the photographer arranges the portraits in a series, he/she places more emphasis on the time that has elapsed, leaving it to the viewer to imagine the events taking place between the photographs, in certain cases a person’s life. If the series is narrowed down to only two elements, the one showing 'before', the other 'after', this emphasis becomes even stronger.

Barna Burger took a minimal series of portraits consisting of two portraits each of well-known and unknown people: before and after. Naturally the subject matter is the time in between, which may be a few minutes or several hours, and the activity it contains. How does the tension before a match appear on the face of a footballer and how can one tell from it afterwards whether his team won or lost? How do actors’ faces look before a performance and after it? Which shows more of the role they play engraved on their faces? Do the rock musician's features show before the concert whether the performance will be a good one and is there anything left afterwards other than success, exhaustion and relief?

In this project, Barna Burger is working in the field of 'comparative photography', as this genre was once named by Alfred Döblin in connection with the photographs of August Sander. He is not comparing specific occupations, characters or ages, but looking for changes in the individuals. Besides performers revealing themselves to the public day after day, people not in the limelight also appear; while we think we recognize the 'before' and 'after' of the former, we can only guess at what we see in the faces of the latter. Perhaps our everyday way of seeing is not enough to tell which picture was taken of the nun before praying and which one afterwards.

The method the photographer uses to give us this opportunity for comparison is extremely concentrated: the faces appear on the pictures almost to the exclusion of all else, with the background reduced to a minimum. There are no surroundings, there are no accessories, there are no differences in lighting or other points of reference. The viewer can only rely on the most subtle signs: one or two deeper wrinkles on a face, a slight increase in colour, suggest the event about to happen or already past. It is left to the viewers’ own knowledge of people, their own subjective experience, as to how they interpret the features.

Relying on the photographic traditions of Helmar Lerski and August Sander, Barna Burger creates individual character sketches. He does this by going against classic traditions of photography and his own approach originating in documentary photographs, and moves forward by placing the event itself in brackets.

(József Mélyi, curator of the exhibition)

photo: Reichel Tamás