Fate-performance
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- Fate-performance
- Sorsbemutató
- 1976
- 28 b&w photographs with texts on black cardboard, 100 x 72 cm
Tibor Hajas’ "Fate Performance" can be viewed as a photographic study from the set to his short film “Self Fashion Show,” where the protagonists—everyday people from the city—pose with different utensils and clothes, pretending to be stars in front of the camera for a short while and thereby escaping the harsh reality of life in János Kádár’s communist Hungary of the 1970s. Whether a family with children, an old lady leaning on a cane, an athletic guy with a cigarette in his mouth, a women carrying a shopping bag, or just a casual passer-by, they all feel the glamor of posing on a stage and forget their everyday routines. Although this was a street action, the black backdrop suggests an elegant ambience and directs the gaze away from city life by forming an open-air studio platform. Whereas the film shows the people in static poses, the photographs give insight into its making, with assistants huddling around the platform to make subjects feel at ease and present themselves in the properly against the backdrop. W.S.