About

Hungarian photographer Tamas Dezso is known for his beautiful yet somber look at the pastoral landscapes and forgotten ways of life of Hungary, Romania, and other parts of Eastern Europe.

In his latest series Everything is Leaf, Dezso explores the idea of intertwining the fundamental and core elements of human and vegetal identity. The heterogeneous character of the work reflects the diverse and far-reaching notions of thinkers who have inspired him – and the individual images, diptychs, triptychs and series of various scale and viewpoints.

His earlier series Notes for an Epilogue and Here, Anywhere depict a time of transition in rural Romania and across Hungary following the fall of Communism in the late 1980s. As people flock to urban centers in search of a new way of life, villages have become disappearing symbols of the old reigning regimes. Dezso’s large-scale, monochromatic landscapes instill a sober tone to the images, which reference those left behind and still clinging to centuries-old traditions. The lush naturalistic elements in Dezso’s photographs present a poetic counter point to the detritus. Like characters from a novel, the captivating people in his works, as well as the forgotten factories and landscapes, reveal nations and a people at a crossroad. Dezso’s photographs pay homage to the customs and traditions that have passed from generation to generation, and succeed as eyewitness to a rapidly vanishing world.

Tamas Dezso’s work has been exhibited worldwide, including the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art; FOAM Photo Museum, Amsterdam; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico; the Hungarian Cultural Institute, Bratislava, Slovakia; and the Helsinki Photography Biennial, Helsinki, Finland. His photographs have appeared in The New York Times, Le Monde magazine and Harpers magazine, and many other publications. Tamas Dezso was nominated for the 2012 Prix Pictet award. Dezso’s monograph, Notes for an Epilogue was published by Hatje Cantz in 2015.