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Zoltán Jókay
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Photographs: Zoltán Jókay

Text: Claudio Hils and Thomas Knubben

Publisher: Schaden Verlag

72 pages

Year: 2001

ISBN: 3-932187-21-0

Price: 45 €

Comments: Softcover, 27 x 21 cm, color photographs. First edition. In very good condition!

With Zoltán Jókay, the city of Ravensburg is embarking on several years of photographic field research, a gradual social and aesthetic self-exploration. Over an initial period of five years, different photographic artists will be invited each year to explore the urban space. Against the backdrop of omnipresent media, globalisation and the acceleration of living environments, these photographers will take up artistic-documentary positions on the social and cultural living space of the city at the beginning of the 21st century.

The ordinary and everyday, the counterpart to the prevailing event culture, will be at the centre of their photographic investigation.

Zoltán Jókay is the first scholarship holder to take up residence in Ravensburg. He spent an entire summer focussing on the city, circling it and combing its length and breadth. His photographic interest is in portraits and with a good two dozen portraits he has created a new, unusual image of the city. They are pictures of unusual closeness and sometimes irritating directness, but at the same time they are also pictures of great human sympathy. Therein lies their peculiar magic. By directing his gaze towards the gaze of the other, Zoltán Jókay also directs the viewer's gaze towards it and, through reflection, reveals to him an insight into his own constitution.

- After Thomas Knubben and Claudio Hils's foreword