1st place
gold star award
Deim Balazs
hungary
title
Surveillance System
I placed home-made camera obscuras/pinhole cameras at high points of busy public spaces and I left them there for 12 weeks so that the cameras take pictures with long exposure time and the squares are shown empty. This way, it is the place that becomes significant, which triggers our ideas of its function and its memories.
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entry description
Today’s urban society is surrounded by signs of control in streets, public spaces and sometimes even in private spheres. Surveillance camera, with its invisible representatives of control in the background, has become the symbol of our new reality.With this project I try to challenge this reality and reveal a reverse one, where the observed people disappear from the surfaces of the photos and only the empty squares are left behind.I placed home-made camera obscuras/pinhole cameras at high points of busy public spaces and I left them there for 12 weeks so that the cameras take pictures with long exposure time and the squares are shown empty. This way, it is the place that becomes significant, which triggers our ideas of its function and its memories.
about the photographer
Balázs Deim (born 1987) is a photographer based in Budapest and Szentendre. He studied applied photography at the Novus Art School Budapest (2007-2009) and completed a BA in Photography at the University of Kaposvár (2013). In his works he focuses on the relationship between people and the urban environment and he is interested in concepts such as absence, memory, control and space. Balázs has been regularly exhibiting his work since 2008, including solo shows at the Fuga Budapest Center of Architecture (2014) and the B32 Gallery, Budapest (2018). He was also a selected participant of the European Month of Photography and exhibited his project entitled “Surveillance system” at the MUSA, Vienna (2016) and at the Cercle-cité, Luxembourg (2017). In 2018 he won the Different Worlds 2018 photography competition and the Luka Koper Photography Award with series Space.back to gallery