The boy in the bearskin, a snowy birch forest, the plump peasant couple in colorful everyday costumes. Then: decay. An interplay of dreamy rustic fairytale worlds and the harsh crumbling reality shapes the mood of the illustrated book by Tamas Dezso. The photographer documents for the first time Romania´s old traditions, agricultural customs, and the dark shadow of the former regime. Lethargy is not only part of the story, it determines the air of his imagery. 'Notes for an Epilogue' was published by Hatje Cantz Publishing, and is the first book of the Hungarian artist. An engaging eyewitness account of a rapidly vanishing world.
With large-scale color photographs, Tamas Dezso describes the forgotten way of life of an economically exhausted Romania and isolated regions within the country. He focuses on the margins of Romanian society, a centuries-old culture with its customs and traditions that have been passed on orally from generation to generation, but never documented. Dezso also illuminates the crumbling structures of forgotten factories, the effects of the autocratic regime lasting from 1946 until 1989.
The artist on his book: "Spiritual tradition and physical heritage are simultaneously disintegrating in Romania. Time is beginning to undermine centuries-old traditions preserved in tiny villages, in communities of only a few houses, as well as the bastions of the communist era’s enforced industrialization, which became part and parcel of Romania’s recent history. Those living in the reservations of forgetting blend with nature, exhibiting a humility inherited through generations. Urged on by modernization, they are living out their last days in evident equality of closeness to nature and, helping time, they are diligently pulling down the absurd edifices of their environment. In the manner of termites, they carry away small pieces of immense concrete constructions on the rickety carts of poverty, pick through reinforced concrete frames of former factory monsters, power stations and furnaces, dismantling monuments of formerly enforced modernization which have corroded into a stage set. Four years ago, I began photographing the scenes of a world irreversibly decaying, the transformation of a Balkan country surviving the region’s hardest dictatorship. When capturing the still recordable milieu I am examining the parallel of a general tendency and personal stories: as resilient humanity condensing into symbolic destinies takes shape in the face of mortality."
About - Tomas Dezso was born in 1978 and lives in Budapest. His works were displayed at worldwide group and solo exhibitions and published in renowned publications including Time Magazine, the New York Times, National Geographic, Geo, Le Monde, The Sunday Times, and The British Journal of Photography.
Tamas Dezso - 'Notes for an Epilogue' . 160 pages, 69 ills. . Text by Eszter Szablyár . hatjecantz.de