Du musst dein Leben ändern!
Oliver Lantos
The series focuses on the polarised political discourse and its representation in the media and its impact on the human psyche, while also exploring the relationship between politics, nature and the living world.
In the series, the images are linked according to a universal system of symbols, forming pairs of images that form an endless chain of associations with each other. In the process, I work with staged photographs, but consciously on way that seems to be looking at the world around us through the eyes of a 21st century flaneur.
The frame of the heterogeneous series is a balance between nature and the human-made environment - this can be a social environment, personal situations or human-made physical space - so the built environment is as much a part of the picture as the natural one.
The frustration experienced in one is what drives the exploration of the other, but the politics and digital world has an impact on everything. In associative imagery, I am not looking for solutions, rather to interpret, to find similarities and connections between the environment and the current mood of the people living in it, and their visions of the future.
*“You must change your life.” Rainer Maria Rilke
Oliver Lantos (b.1992) is a Hungarian photographer currently living and working in Budapest.
His works are mostly long term project, whose starting point are personal experience or a visceral reaction. He is interested in the systematization of his observations and researches, and the process of building these systems.
In his projects, he usually explores the effect of contemporary politics, the LGBTQ community, and the casual relationships between the problems of global social systems and their consequences, as well as their effects on human psyche and nature.
He graduated from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME) in Budapest, in 2022, before that he studied at the KREA Contemporary Art Institute. Member of the Studio of Young Photographers since 2023. In 2024 he was awarded the József Pécsi Photography Grant.
Male Geist
The series explores the concept of masculinity. I contrast the symbols associated with masculinity and their effects with the patterns they bring. My project is based on social psychology literature and interviews, which I supplement with my own perspectives. I seek causal links between them and build a system along an associative chain.
My aim is to portray the man of the present age, with all his fragility and problems. It is an attempt to find images of the man of the 21st century. I want to nuance the stereotypes associated with men and masculinity in the past. The symbolic and associative images, processed from research and interviews, form the structure of the series. These will be supplemented with images from my own experiences and from my observation of the contemporary environment. In the following, I will create a system to map the male psyche in the 21st century and its influences.
I started my project during the József Pécsi Photography Grant 2024 and I am currently working on it.