Mai Manó Gallery ("Kis Manó")

The most successful participant of the international portfolio consultation PHOTOPORT, organized jointly by the Association of Hungarian Photographers, the Young Photographers’ Studio, and the Hungarian House of Photography, earns the possibility to showcase their work at the Mai Manó Gallery. In 2012, the winner was Zoé Lili Érmezei; her series Intimacy is exhibited in 2013.

Privacy

Photos of the series PRIVACY were created together with a blind young man.

With my eyes closed, I took photographs “blindly”. My collaborator was my leader in the world without vision. I asked him to introduce me to a space I had ever known or seem before – to take me to his personal space and help me explore that without the ability to see.

I experienced something extraordinary as this boy, who is blind from birth, held my hand and familiarized me with his world and the lights there-in.

Instead of seeing, composition was assisted by touching. Taking pictures of each other was a new kind of cognition and experience. It was an insight into the other’s world.

ÉRMEZEI Lili

Both of Lili Zoé Érmezei’s series study limits that appear between people in situations built on trust, investigating their shifting, dissolution, and meanings. She changes a conventional component of situations, or picks the person in a way that we become part of an unexpected and bold journey. She diverts us from the usual in order to make us re-read and re-write the world.

In Privacy, we set off with the safety of a young blind man’s grip, who is visually impaired from birth, and proceed to see Lili Zoé Érmezei and the young man himself through this process in the invisible and visible world they traveled together. Setting the boundary for the impossible, she formulates questions through her messages during the process: is one that can see able to not see? What kind of patterns does one who has never seen the world apply to develop his or her internal images? What kind of knowledge of our world does the sense of touch bring us to? And how dominant does one mode of perception become in the absence of the other? Does it get attenuated or stronger?

CSIZEK Gabriella