Gabor Szilasi: Photographs, 1954-1996

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

This volume of bilingual text and photographs was published to coincide
with the exhibition of Gabor Szilasi’s photographs, 1954 to 1996, held
at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in November 1997. In the foreword,
Marcel Blouin writes of the distinguished Hungarian-born Canadian
photographer’s “uniquely tranquil approach to photography, marked by
a deep desire to record faces, places and architecture.” In his
introductory essay “A Humanist Way of Seeing,” Frank Michel portrays
Szilasi as a humanist in outlook, a documentarian in style, and a
pioneer in auteur photography in Quebec and Canada. David Harris follows
with his essay “The Photographs of Gabor Szilasi,” in which he
outlines the photographer’s artistic and educational development, his
predilection for “realism,” his intermingling of the sacred and the
secular in his photographs, and his experiments with technique, cameras,
lighting, and film stock.

While the essays provide a useful context, the photographs that follow
stand alone as tributes to Szilasi’s artistic achievements. Whatever
the subject—the interiors of homes, the exteriors of buildings,
streets and alleys, or human beings—there’s a hypnotic quality in
these mostly black-and-white photographs that draws and holds the
viewer’s interest. Together, they stand as a permanent record of a
master photographer’s talent.