It starts when he's barely 16.

"When my family finally declared me hopeless and the big family council had decided that I should become a photographer if I couldn't study, my uncle gave me an SLR camera as a gift." That was how life started by the photographer Péter Nádas.

An artist who is basically still not well known, although he has not only dedicated numerous essays to photography and has also published several books with his own photographs, such as “Shadow History”, “The Own Death” and “Some Light”.

Christopher Schutte

Freelance author in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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It may be that this is also due to the fact that Nádas had completely given up analogue photography for some time with the change in technology and only found access to digital photographic art again a few years ago.

Or because the young photographer from “Einwas Licht”, who became a reporter on the advice of the family, hasn’t actually existed for a good fifty years.

While Nádas has long been one of the great contemporary European writers with short stories and novels such as the “Book of Remembrance”.

“Scary Stories”, his new novel, will be published by Rowohlt on October 11th.

But even if it may sound rather pathetic when the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” once tried to sum up Nádas' photographic work as “farewell to the 20th century” as a kind of picture and essay: A discovery, as shown by two Frankfurt exhibitions , the photographer Nádas always is.

This applies to the color photographs from the past three years, which the Peter Sillem Gallery is showing, as well as to the black-and-white photographs, primarily from the 1960s and 1970s, but also from the 1980s and 1990s, which can be seen in the exhibition hall in Sachsenhausen are.

And overall for a work whose two phases, separated by around 20 years without a camera, differ fundamentally not only in terms of the material.

phases, of course,

Here and there he uses almost classic genres.

Among the current color photographs, for example, there are still lifes and nocturnal landscapes in particular, while the early works created in the Magyar provinces are primarily devoted to portraits, nature photographs and genre-like images of everyday life in the still rural province.

They show a life like “In the country, in the villages”, as one of the chapters in “Some Light” is entitled, has long since disappeared.

nuance and depth

Nádas prefaced the volume published in 1999 with “Distinguishing black from black”, and in fact that is exactly what he is aiming for: differentiation instead of a polarizing black and white.

It is the way he deals with light and shadow as well as bright and dark that gives his photographic essays, as one cannot help but call these early works, their inimitable tone, devoid of any sentimentality and interwoven with gentle melancholy.

And one certainly doesn't want to call it a coincidence when the disappearance of a world, as Nádas describes it one last time in these pictures, coincides with the gradual end of analogue photography.

Photographer and author Nádas were initially equally convinced that there was no room for nuances or depth in the digital age.

Which one can no longer say in this generality for a long time.

But it would be years before Nádas learned to appreciate the advantages of the medium as well as the losses.

But above all: its mistakes, shortcomings and defects.

In any case, the color photographs, all of which were taken in his own garden, and in particular the landscapes captured mainly at night, which can be seen in the Sillem Gallery, speak precisely of this.

And they take advantage of the inability of the mobile phone camera, which simply doesn't know what to do with some information that is immersed in deep darkness.

The result is astoundingly painterly pictures that have a profoundly romantic effect here and there, especially in the still lifes that are as simple as they are simply enchanting, visibly seem to tie in with the old masters.

And thus presenting a reflection of painting and art history that has become an image itself, which is new in Nádas' photographic work.

The fact that it is the obvious flaws in the technique that the artist makes use of here appears to be an ironic point about this quite surprising group of works.

A late work, with which the photo artist Péter Nádas, after “farewell to the 20th century”, uses digital means to travel back to another time, so to speak.

To images that only art can still tell stories about.

“You don't have to understand a picture,” says Péter Nádas, “you don't have to understand it, you have to see it.” Both exhibitions use their own means to explain what that means.

Péter Nádas Until October 22nd.

Galerie Peter Sillem, Dreieichstraße 2, Frankfurt, Wednesdays and Fridays 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Thursdays 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturdays 2 to 4 p.m.

Exhibition hall, Schulstrasse 1a, Frankfurt, Wednesdays and Thursdays 6 to 8 p.m., Fridays to Sundays 2 to 6 p.m.

On October 22 at 11 a.m., Nádas will come to the exhibition hall for a discussion.