Full Name Vancsó Zoltán Website www.zoltan.pictures | Occupation photo reporter | |
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Born 29 October 1972 (age 44) ( 1972-10-29 ) Budapest, Hungary Notable work Silent Stills (2002) Twincity, Budapest-Paris (2006) Still Movies (1995-2007) Unintended Light (2008)
Between Nothingness and Eternity (2010) Awards Balogh Rudolf Award (2002) | ||
Zoltan Vancso (born October 29, 1972, in Budapest) is a Hungarian photographer, photo reporter. He primarily became renowned for his black and white photography but nowadays he takes color photos reflecting explicit and deliberate concepts. His work is characterized by a peculiar "Vancsonesque” perspective: opting for formally simple solutions but nonetheless creating an inexhaustible world through his pictures. "It is not allowed to either write of, think of or associate the photos of Zoltan Vancso with anything. These pictures are objects of meditation." Peter Mueller, writer. "Zoltan Vancso cultivates photography philosophically, and saying this is the greatest compliment, the deepest form of appreciation on my part." (Peter Dobai, writer, dramaturge)
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Life and work
Zoltan Vancso was born in 1972 in Budapest. His elementary school art teacher, Ferenc Varga started him off in the world of pictures; he got enamored of motion picture as a cameraman for school television. In 1991 he was accepted to the photographer specialty class in the No. 6 Vocational School (Prater Street, Budapest). Meanwhile, he achieved great success as a student filmmaker in Valencia, Mondavio and Budapest. He tried to gain acceptance into the photography major of the College of Industrial Arts several times but due to his feeble talent for drawing his application was denied; in 2006 he also unsuccessfully applied to the cameraman specialty of the University of Film Arts. From 1993 to 2005 he worked as a photo reporter for the weekly "168 hours". Between 2002 and 2012 he was a teacher at the Camera Anima Open Academy, between 2008 and 2009, he was the photography editor and photo columnist of news portal "zoom.hu". Since 2009, he works as a freelance photographer and he holds lectures at several photography schools.
Vancso takes part in the activities of several professional organizations: 1996-2006 in Studio of Young Photographers Hungary (FFS); since 2004, in Young Photographers United (YPU); since 2002, in the Association of Hungarian Photographers, here he worked with the board of directors for two years; since 2005, in the National Association of Hungarian Artists (MAOE).
Photographic oeuvre
Between 1998 and 2008 he has won the Pecsi Jozsef Photography Scholarship several times, in 2002 he won the Hungart Scholarship, in 2003 he was awarded the Balogh Rudolf Award. In 2004 he spent two months in Paris under the Andre Kertesz Scholarship. He has won the creative scholarship of the National Cultural Fund four times. His first slideshow completed in 2005, Ocean of Sighs – Cuba, was the first in the history of photography to gain entry to national film distribution: it was screened with great success before Wim Wenders' Don't Come Knocking in movie theatres. In 2006 he won the creative scholarship of the National Association of Hungarian Artists (MAOE). In 2010 he was awarded the title Photographer of the Year by Foto- Video Magazine due to achieving first place in the EISA Maestro Photo Competition. In 2011, he won a professional and an audience award at the international photo book tender of Blurb, the leader of on-demand photo book publishing (Photography Book Now 2011). He received a month-long scholarship in Lisbon as part of the Budapest Gallery international residency program.
Vancso presents his work to the public from time to time in a purposeful and exigent manner; between 1995 and 2014 he participated in 50 individual and more than 20 group exhibitions, mostly in Hungarian galleries. From 2002 to 2015, 14 of his individual photo albums have been published.
The year 2012 brought a turning point in his professional life, since then he believes more strongly in the power of movie screenings than in traditional photography exhibitions. In the fall of 2012 he presented the first Hungarian feature-length photo-movie (slideshow) in the distribution of Budapest Film entitled Landslides – Discovering the void, which was screened with great success across the theatres of the Art movie network in Budapest. Encouraged by the excellent reception, he held two completely sold out retrospective independent slideshow evenings entitled Vancso! Live, then in November he made the presentation of his two new photo albums memorable, again by using movie screenings. In April, 2014 he organized an all-day series of screenings called "Photovancso-Marathon"; in the same year he made his debut at the Month of Photography 2014 festival with 5 independent slideshow evenings. His name is linked with the first Hungarian 4K Ultra HD slideshow movie screening.
Zoltan Vancso sets out to capture mundane, undirected moments that practically demand to have mysterious stories invented about them. He creates context where there were previously none and by this, even coincidence is impregnated with meaning. Looking at his pictures, we tread through improbable lands; strange, inexplicable things happen to us. These are subjective landscapes, which only open up if we pay close attention to ourselves and the world." (Tibor Miltenyi, aesthete)
The lively connection with the audience is very important for Vancso; the spectacular result of this is a Facebook community with 11000 members where he publishes his works on a weekly basis. As part of the annual Photovancso Open Day, he welcomes his visitors in his own home. (With respect to the great interest shown in 2013 and 2014 the event was held in external locations: in Gallery IX and at the Open Workshop.)
In the end of 2010 he was the first Hungarian photographer to create a web shop where he made all his notable works available to the public in unnumbered copies.
His other passion is music. In parallel with photography, he completed a course in sound engineering and used to spend his free time playing the piano, composing. In the last few years, finding his spiritual path became an important aspect of his life besides photography; he often goes hiking to forests and practices yoga and zazen regularly.