by Sylvia Plachy

The legendary photographer Richard Avedon wrote of Sylvia Plachy: “She makes me laugh and she breaks my heart. She is moral. She is everything a photographer should be. Plachy`s poetic and visually stunning work brilliantly combines memoirs and wry observation in this major retrospective collection of images ranging over forty years. Capturing the curiousness of everyday events, Plachy`s pictures combine personal narrative with public display, and through the immediacy of her experience encapsulate the timelessness of metaphor and dream. “What makes you push the shutter has to do with seeking a kind of perfection, a harmony in the world,” Plachy says. “You are instinctively aware it`s there, but you`ve got to be completely alert and quick and so deeply awake that it moves you.”

Plachy comes from a tradition of Hungarian photographers, including Brassai, Robert Capa, and Andre Kertesz. Kertesz, who was a mentor to her, said this of her images: “I have never seen the moment sensed and caught on film with more intimacy and humanity”. Plachy`s images are by turns fond, witty, searching, and sad. A simple black-and-white image of frisking lambs evokes the rural life of her ancestors, while puppet-like figures hanging in an art gallery recall the nearly 1,200 protesters executed after the revolution, when Hungary fell back under Soviet control.

The work of the artist “is not so much what you say or what you know, it`s recognizing what you know. That`s what life is about. That`s what photography is about. You see something, or you hear someone say something, and you say `That is a truth.` You fall in love with that truth. That`s what it is, it`s falling in love.”

Known for weekly pictures in the Village Voice, Sylvia Plachy has published widely in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Time, Fortune, The Smithsonian, Wired, Aperture, Artforum, Metropolis, Grand Street, and Granta, among others. She has exhibited widely, and has authored numerous books and exhibitions.

Plachy was born in Budapest, Hungary, to parents who hid during the Nazi persecution only to escape the Hungarian revolution, buried under corn in the back of a truck. She now lives in New York City with her husband Elliott Brody, and is the mother of Academy Award-winning actor Adrien Brody. “Tremendously gifted and talented as an artist, she is also a real survivor and the hardest working person I know,” says her son.

Hardcover / $40 USD
18.9″ x 6.5″ / 87 pages
83 Duotone / 13 color
May 2008
ISBN: 978-1-884167-92-8

Download the press release (PDF)