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ADAM
MAGYAR IS A computer geek, a college dropout, a self-taught
photographer, a high-tech Rube Goldberg, a world traveler, and a
conceptual artist of growing global acclaim. But nobody had ever
suggested that he might also be a terrorist until the morning that he
descended into the Union Square subway station in New York.
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At
the time, Magyar was immersed in a long-running techno-art project
called Stainless, creating high-resolution images of speeding
subway trains and their passengers, using sophisticated software he
created and hardware that he retrofitted himself. The scanning
technique he developed—combining thousands of pixel-wide slices
into a single image—allows him to catch passengers unawares as they
hurtle through dark subway tunnels, fixing them in haunting images
filled with detail no ordinary camera can capture.
Magyar
set up his standard array of devices—camera, scanner, voltage
meters, blue and black cables, battery pack, tripod, laptop—and
waited for a train to roll into the station. He hadn’t anticipated
the vigilance of post-9/11 New Yorkers, several of whom complained to
the police about the longhaired man wielding what looked like a
jerry-built piece of surveillance equipment. It didn’t take long
before a transit cop approached him.
“What
are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m
scanning trains,” Magyar said.
The
policeman led Magyar to a room in the bowels of Union Square, then
summoned a pair of plainclothes officers to interrogate him. They
inspected his equipment, pored through his digital files. “Tell us
who you’re working for,” they said.
Once
Magyar convinced them that he was not scrutinizing the subway for
nefarious purposes, that he was an artist (his website,
featuring examples of his work, helped), the police settled on a $25
fine for violating a regulation against using a tripod on the
platform, and sent him on his way.
IT
WAS NOT THE FIRST TIME that Adam Magyar has had to explain his
work to mystified observers. Born in Hungary in 1972, Magyar began
taking pictures in his late twenties, roaming the streets of Asian
cities and capturing images of Indian street vendors, Hindu holy men,
and Himalayan students. His work evolved rapidly from conventional
documentary photography to surreal, radically experimental imagery
that reflects his obsession with finding innovative new uses for
digital technology. A self-taught engineer and software designer who
assembled his first computer while in his teens, Magyar captures his
images using some of the world’s most sophisticated photographic
equipment, modified with software he writes himself. Additional code,
also of his own design, removes nearly all distortion, or “noise,”
from his data, producing images of remarkable clarity.
In
a growing body of photographic and video art done over the past
decade, Magyar bends conventional representations of time and space,
stretching milliseconds into minutes, freezing moments with a
resolution that the naked eye could never have perceived. His art
evokes such variegated sources as Albert Einstein, Zen Buddhism, even
the 1960s TV series The Twilight Zone. The images—sleek
silver subway cars, solemn commuters lost in private worlds—are
beautiful and elegant, but also produce feelings of disquiet. “These
moments I capture are meaningless, there is no story in them, and if
you can catch the core, the essence of being, you capture probably
everything,” Magyar says in one of the many cryptic comments about
his work that reflect both their hypnotic appeal and their
elusiveness. There is a sense of stepping into a different dimension,
of inhabiting a space between stillness and movement, a time-warp
world where the rules of physics don’t apply.
“I grew up in my father’s workshop. I learned to work with tools, I developed a general understanding of materials. And I learned how to combine things.”
Magyar’s
work represents a fruitful cross-fertilization of technology and art,
two disciplines—one objective and mathematical, the other entirely
subjective—that weren’t always regarded as harmonious or
compatible. Yet the two are intertwined, and breakthroughs in
technology have often made new forms of art possible. Five thousand
years ago, Egyptian technicians heated desert sand, limestone,
potash, and copper carbonate in kilns to make a synthetic pigment
known as “Egyptian blue,” which contributed to the highly
realistic yet stylized portraiture of the Second and Third Dynasties.
By
the fifteenth century, paint based on transparent walnut and linseed
oil began to replace opaque egg-based tempera, infusing art with a
new luminosity and naturalism that paved the way for Renaissance
masters like Jan Van Eyck, Tintoretto, and Caravaggio.
Nineteenth-century experiments with light-sensitive materials capable
of capturing and stabilizing an image—beginning with Louis
Daguerre’s silver-plated sheets of copper fumed with iodine
vapor—led to the invention of photography. In the 1950s, rapid
improvements in emulsions and film speed allowed movie directors to
take their craft outdoors and shoot in minimal light—propelling the
naturalistic New Wave cinema of Jean-Luc Godard and other innovators.
Magyar
has lived in Berlin since January 2008, yet has had few gallery
exhibitions there and doesn’t mingle with local artists. “The
galleries are a bit punk, and my stuff is an engineer kind of thing,”
he told me, brewing espresso in the kitchen, while his girlfriend,
Zazi Porcsalmy, a Hungarian translator whom he has known since high
school, served Christmas cookies in the living room. Although he has
lived in Berlin for six years, Magyar barely speaks German, a
reflection of both his immersion in other disciplines—“I spent
the time here learning two computer languages, I didn’t have time
for anything else,” he explains—and the detached-observer quality
that permeates his work. Like the subway passengers he pins down in
his Stainlessseries, I’ve managed to pin down Magyar during a
momentary pause in a life of constant motion: He’s permanently
passing through.
Magyar
was born and raised in the Hungarian city of Debrecen, a regional
center of 200,000 just west of the Romanian border. His mother was a
dentist, his father an architect and interior designer who created
bars and restaurants for a state-owned company during the Communist
era. The elder Magyar moonlighted as an artist, making fanciful light
fixtures and other household objects out of copper in a workshop
beside his home. “I grew up in my father’s workshop,” Magyar
remembers. “I learned to work with tools, I developed a general
understanding of materials. And I learned how to combine things.”
Magyar’s parents sent him to an elementary school that specialized
in music, and he sang with Hungary’s most prestigious youth choir,
performing in Finland and Greece when most travel to the West was
banned. He attended an advanced technological high school, but he
found the curriculum too theoretical and rebelled against the
discipline. “I was the only one in the class who didn’t have to
wear a uniform. I was never easily controllable,” he says. Magyar
dropped out of college, taught himself computer code, built
rudimentary computers, and supported himself doing graphic design on
a freelance basis and, for two years, running a one-man business that
printed corporate logos on pencils and cigarette lighters. “It was
horrible, but it was money,” he told me.
By
this point the Berlin Wall had fallen, the Eastern Bloc had
dissolved, and Magyar could indulge a growing wanderlust. “I always
wanted to travel, ever since I remembered. I was about four when I
was dreaming about leaving for the world,” he recalls. “My father
once told me that there used to be people whose profession was
‘traveler,’ and I took it literally. I liked the idea of living
from a suitcase, going from place to place. I think it stuck in my
brain. When I received my first salary, I just left. I think I am a
permanent traveler in a way.” He backpacked through Morocco and, at
27, visited India for the first time. “It was the most difficult
place I had ever been,” he says. “The colors, the smells—it’s
heavy to digest. It became a kind of icon, and I started going back
every year.”
Magyar’s
life of travel honed his skills as an observer and reinforced his
sense of being an outsider. At one level he seemed in constant
motion. At another level he was capable of remaining still for long
periods simply watching the flow of life. He once spent six months
studying the movement of the river in Varanasi, the ancient Hindu
capital on the Ganges. During that trip, he asked Zazi to bring him a
book on introductory photography that he had won as a prize years
before in elementary school. “I was almost 30,” he said. “And I
started learning about apertures and light and developing my stuff in
a darkroom. I loved it.” A year later, he documented daily life at
a private school in Darjeeling, a Himalayan hill station in
northeastern India, and his series of black-and-white photos won
first prize in the annual Hungarian Press Photography competition.
“He never worked too fast,” Zazi remembers. “If he found a
person or a place intriguing he’d stand around for hours.”
But
Magyar quickly found that straightforward documentary photography
bored him. He set up a camera inside a movie theater in Varanasi, and
shot one-minute exposures of the audience in near-total darkness. He
shot images of passengers seated in the rear of taxis in Calcutta,
and individuals framed inside doctors’ waiting rooms and in an
elevator in Shanghai. Hannah Frieser, the former director of Light
Work, an artist-run cooperative that organized an ambitious
exhibition of Magyar’s work, Kontinuum, in three U.S. museums
in 2013—Light Work in Syracuse, the Houston Center for Photography,
and the Griffin Museum of Photography outside Boston—says that “the
elevator series is pivotal to understanding him. It reflects this
idea of taking your camera and making it the stationary part and
photographing individuals over and over again. He doesn’t look at
people in a judgmental way. He avoids asking a lot of questions.
Instead it is just this experience of observing and being present,
and defining life through this flow.” The work also reflected
Magyar’s growing interest in the limitations of the human sensory
perception, compared to what was possible with certain new and old
technologies, and prefigured his efforts to push the boundaries of
what we can see and experience. “I wanted to surround people in a
cage, in a way. I was thinking about how little choice we have when
we select our path,” he told me. “We are able to see just a
narrow angle, whatever we do. Our knowledge is really limited, and
small.”
MAGYAR
BEGAN EXPERIMENTING with scanning in 2003. “I wanted to get
out of conventional photography,” he told me. “I remember I
didn’t sleep too much. I was up whole nights, thinking about how to
do it.” In an early experiment, Magyar built his own primitive
scanner, using an East German slide projector that cast a narrow
light beam. Then he constructed a platform out of a stack of Lego
bricks that permitted the beam to “scan” across a subject by
slowly tilting from top to bottom. A standard reflex camera captured
all of the scanned lines in a single shot, re-assembling them into
one image during a minute-long exposure. In effect, the scanner was
slicing a minute of time into thin sections, and the camera was
stacking the slices back together, creating a single image composed
of all those moments. Magyar took to scanning himself, experimenting
with different physical movements that created distorted final
images. “When you turned around, the image that came out showed
your body as a corkscrew,” he says. “It was an interesting
technological experiment, but that was it. I put it away for years.”
He
remained fascinated, however, by the notion of capturing different
parts of a person or of people at different times, constructing a
still image out of “little pieces,” he says. This matched his
growing interest in what he calls “the ever-changing nature of the
present,” the constant flow of life that defied easy visual
representation.
In
2006, during a months-long stay in Shanghai, he had an epiphany. “I
had this feeling that I would, like, scan the flow of people. I
began looking for the right kind of spaces where I could find a
monotonous flow.” Magyar first studied escalators in Shanghai
shopping malls. Then his gaze shifted to city streets—particularly
major intersections or bus stops with a continuous procession of
humanity. Once he had the concept in his head, he set about to
develop the technology to realize it. “It was continuous research,”
he says. “It took me a few weeks to figure it out.”
The
answer, Magyar realized, was a modified version of the “slit scan”
camera, the type used to determine photo finishes at racetracks and
at Olympic sporting events by capturing a time sequence in one image.
Such cameras were rare and cost many thousands of dollars, so Magyar
set out to build one himself. He joined a medium-format camera lens
to another sensor and wrote his own software for the new device.
Total cost: $50. He inverted the traditional scanning method, where
the sensor moves across a stationary object. This time, the sensor
would remain still while the scanned objects were in motion, being
photographed one consecutive pixel-wide strip at a time. (This is the
basic principle of the photo-finish camera.) Magyar mounted the
device on a tripod in a busy Shanghai neighborhood and scanned
pedestrians as they passed in front of the sensor. He then digitally
combined over 100,000 sequential strips into high-resolution
photographs.
The
result was Urban Flow, a series of one-foot-high,
eight-foot-long prints that captured a parade of humanity marching
through time: Those at the far right had passed by the sensor
approximately two minutes before those on the far left. “Each
little fragment is the present, and all these present fractions come
together to give you the story,” Magyar explains. “By the time we
see the story, it’s like our memory. It’s already past.”
Eerie
distortions of objects in motion and at rest reminded viewers that
they were looking at a pictorial representation of time, not space.
Speeding buses were compressed into Smart cars. Passing buses were
elongated like Metroliners. Slower walkers had billowing pants legs,
or feet like skis, or Oscar Pistorius–style blades. And because of
the peculiar nature of the scanning technology, everyone was moving
in the same direction. “The horizontal axis is not about space,
it’s not about left and right, it’s about earlier and later,”
he says. “If two people are crossing the pixel at the same moment,
they will look like they are walking together.”
Urban
Flow feels both comical and melancholy; like a time-bending,
mind-bending vision of human destiny and mortality. The choice of
black-and-white imagery came after long consideration. “I
experimented with color, but people looked like colorful confetti,
which was not my point,” says Magyar. “This is not a carnival,
this is a little bit sad for me. We are all heading toward the same
destination, which is sort of a death.”
Lars
Torkuhl, a Shanghai-based design engineer, met Magyar in China, and
visited his Shanghai apartment to see the new work in progress. “It
was shocking to see the place,” Torkuhl recalls. “You had to
carve your way past water bottles and other debris into the room to
navigate to the desk.” After showing Torkuhl his jury-rigged
prototype, Magyar displayed the first of theUrban Flow series on
the computer screen. “I was blown away by the beauty, the crispness
of the image,” says Torkuhl. “I said ‘Adam, this is
extraordinary, are you going to show it?’ But he hadn’t even
thought about it. . . . There was so much technology involved that he
hadn’t dealt with before. He said, ‘this is nowhere near ready.’
I replied ‘What do you mean? It can be ready very soon.’”
Torkuhl
introduced Magyar to a friend, the French artist Thomas Charvériat,
who had just opened a gallery, Island6, in a renovated warehouse in
the artist’s district of Shanghai. Magyar’s slit-scan photographs
captivated Charvériat, too, and he offered to mount an exhibition.
Magyar sold nearly every one of the dozen pieces he had on display—at
modest prices of between $700 to $1,400—and received orders for
several more. Magyar was amazed that his work had any commercial
value at all: “I went back to Hungary, but I knew that I had to
start building something from this.”
“In Zen you can train for five years before you shoot a bow and arrow. And that describes exactly what Adam does. Time doesn’t exist for him.”
HIS
NEXT MAJOR PROJECT was Stainless, shot inside subway
stations in major cities like Paris, Tokyo, and New York City. It was
a quantum leap forward. He invested in a high-quality industrial
camera and a “line scan” device designed to capture
high-resolution images of circuit boards, bottle tops, or other
fast-moving objects on assembly lines, exposing micro-cracks and
other defects incapable of being perceived by standard cameras. The
resulting line-scan camera uses a single row of light-sensitive
sensors to constantly scan moving objects at high speed, eliminating
most distortion.
Stainless consciously
calls to mind the realm of theoretical physics, with its references
to the thought experiments of Albert Einstein. Magyar’s stationary
camera aimed at a moving train bears echoes of Einstein’s
hypothesis that “distant simultaneity”—the idea that two
spatially separated events occur at the same time—is not absolute,
but depends on the observer’s frame of reference. In a famous
thought experiment, Einstein imagined two observers—one standing
inside a speeding train car, the other on a platform as the train
moves past—who perceive the same flash of light at the exact moment
that they cross paths. The passenger in the train sees the light
strike the front and the back of the train car simultaneously; the
stationary bystander sees it hit at different times. Similarly,
Magyar warps time and reveals the subjectivity of human perception:
His line-scan camera transforms a speeding blur into a frozen image
of impossible clarity and stillness, a reality imperceptible to both
passengers speeding into the station and bystanders waiting to board
the train. The individuals in his trains ride together yet apart,
lost in their own thoughts, often transfixed by their hand-held
devices.
“You
start paying attention to how these people interact with their
technology, and how they barely interact with each other,” says
Hannah Frieser, the former director of Light Work. Yet the eerie
images can also be seen as a celebration of the human community,
something that Magyar grew increasingly to appreciate as he traveled
the world. The straphangers he captured in Paris, Shanghai, Hong
Kong, New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, Rome, and Berlin manifest
striking similarities in appearance, expression, and attitude that
transcend cultural and geographical differences. In her catalog notes
for the show, Frieser drew a clear distinction between the street
photography practiced by masters such as Diane Arbus, Gary Winograd,
and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Magyar’s kind of image-making. “The
life that he chronicles is made up of everyday people, not the most
beautiful, eccentric, and destitute who typically draw the attention
of photographers,” she wrote. “They looked for differences
whereas Magyar ascertains similarities. They kept moving through the
city, while Magyar remains stationary and waits for people to move
past his camera … He jumps to different cities in various countries
and continents until the commonalities within mankind begin to
emerge.”
The Stainless photos
also offered the most telling example of Magyar’s relentless
perfectionism. (Pictured above, Stainless #7649 New York)
Magyar desperately wanted to shoot in the tunnels of Tokyo—“the
ultimate subway system, the ultimate urban environment” —but a
subtle flicker in the lighting produced over-exposed and
under-exposed frames that appeared on his images as vertical lines.
Magyar’s solution: He rode the subways for a week with his light
meter, taking readings at all 290 stations in the network. “I found
five stations with high-frequency light, so I could start working
there,” he recalls. “But inside the train the light was still
bad, so I spent three months making the software to get rid of those
lines.” Magyar also faced another problem after his tripod was
banned from the New York City subway system. He was obliged to use a
hand-held camera, which resulted in further distortions on his
images; several weeks were taken up devising more code to eliminate
them. Lars Torkuhl, the German design engineer, compares him to a Zen
Buddhist master. “In Zen you can train for five years before you
shoot a bow and arrow. And that describes exactly what he does,”
Torkuhl told me. “Time doesn’t exist for him. He lives and
executes his work in a crisp, detailed manner, exactly like his
pictures.”
SHORTLY
AFTER COMPLETING Stainless, Magyar began to consider
transitioning to moving images. After months of research, he
persuaded the German manufacturer Optronis to lend him one of its
$16,000, high-performance industrial video cameras—used in crash
tests and robotic-arm studies, and even for analyzing the hind hooves
of show-jumping horses. With a high level of light sensitivity and
advanced TimeBench analysis software, the Optronis shoots
high-resolution images at astonishing speeds: up to 100,000 frames
per second, compared to 24 frames per second in a traditional film
camera.
Magyar
turned the concept of Stainless on its head: Instead of
standing on a platform shooting passengers speeding past him, Magyar
now positioned himself inside the moving subway car, recording
stationary commuters on the platform as train and camera rolled into
the station. Again, the ghost of Einstein permeates these images, and
again, he was warping time: Magyar shot the footage at 56 times
normal speed, turning 12-second blurs into nearly 12-minute films of
excruciating slowness. His commuters stand, together yet apart, with
the studied, three-dimensional grace of statues—only the twitch of
a lip or a finger drawn toward an iPhone indicating that these people
were caught in hyper-slow motion, inhabiting an elongated moment.
Magyar extracts drama from an infinitesimal flash of time. “I want
to capture something that happens in milliseconds, something that you
don’t even realize took place,” he told me. “I’m extending
the moments—the present, the now—because as humans we live only
in the past and the future. But the only existence we have is now,
and that is something that we don’t even consider.”
The
breathtaking clarity of the Stainless videos is also the
result of the most challenging software code he has ever had to
write. In his experiments with industrial cameras, Magyar found that
the image quality was ideal for measuring speed, distance, and
volume, but not entirely suitable for the demands of an artist. He
wrote complex programs to improve the quality of images shot in
conditions of low lighting and poor contrast. Another problem was
image noise—columns, rows, lines, and other random distortions, a
typical issue with high-sensitivity digital sensors. He spent nearly
two years, on and off, developing noise-reduction software, solving
one problem only to confront a new one. “The engineers don’t have
to deal with this, but I do. I cannot sleep. I’m working on this
for months, and I don’t stop. You find a new problem, and you have
to find a solution.” (article :
https://medium.com/matter/88aa8a185898)
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