How can you remember?
How can you say anything of someone's meaning to you without them, that is in their permanent absence?
That is how it all started. With loss and grief, a bleeding journey of memories.
A few days after my mother's death I slept again in my parents' house built by my great grandparents a century ago in rural Hungary, at the edge of the village. After a restless night alone in the house as I walked from my childhood room into the kitchen and saw the reflection of the rising sun in an upper segment of my mother's window.
It was a telltale moment. When I was a bigger kid, my mother would ask me to clean the windows, using newspapers which would give a sound as the glass was getting dry and clean again and with almost micriscopic cracks, invisible in broad daylight, developing on its surface from the circular movement of the hands. That is how I learned doing it from her. That is the exact way with the circular movement her mother and and my grandmother cleaned all our windows, causing the circular cracks on the windows. How many moves in a hundred years?
Anyway, we are together there.
The photograph is as shot.
I took the other photograph not much later via a broken window of a house up for sale a block away from our house. With its one time owner already in the cemetary, the things left all around are reminders of his last actions.
Next time round the room was empty.
That is how my journey started, from memories and things to people and being present.
The below multimedia essay is my testimony of that journey.
This photo, later became in Hungary the Picture of the Year in the Art Category. Titled Hommage to Van Gogh, exhibited in the National Museum in Budapest in 2009
A hundred years of cleanliness
