colours, gaps

It's always ironic for someone to start photography on his first experience abroad. The relationship between fear, loneliness, and foreignness with photographic practice is very often inevitable. It is there for simple reasons if you are still looking for light, colours and contrasts; a struggle against representation, at the same time a kind of tragedy: sacrificing the pleasure of results and frames for more effort and walking.
So for whom are we collecting this massive data? Question worth asking as over the years we learn to travel more and more through the camera obscura.

I'm often told off if I decide to picture the debris of a broken-down building instead of trying to capture the beauty of Budapest monuments or more reasonably to frame a happy moment in a more 'colourful' place.
Those remarks don't just stem from a sense of harmony between a population and a government's politics of representation, nor simply from a sense of national pride. It's a gap in between pride and history.
The no-man lands of construction and the marginalised bits of history behind the big puma or macdonalds banners, or the ones you can only glimpse through the many kilometers of temporary walls are symbolic holes in a country having to imagine its future at extra euro-speed.
The irony of an outsider's position, to catch the cracks whilst through his own country financial cracks blow down an economy so fragile.
The banners and temporary walls on the way to university, to the supermarket, to the bank, to the bar, to bed, to the night-job, to the tube... those banners stay up, reflected everywhere in the plastic colours left by soviet history. They stay up, and mirrors are everywhere that tell history in their own moments.