Background information
"In photo volume 'Human', Hungarian photographer Gábor KUDÁSZ brings the classic image of the worker to a contemporary level. With a simple element - the brick, he succeeds in astonishing and touching us. In his visual encyclopaedia, Gábor KUDÁSZ leads us into a fairy-tale and surreal world between staging and reality. The workers I meet here have little to do with my understanding of manual labor. They behave like philosophers, engineers, scientists and artists and show us a new working world in a familiar setting. The concepts and conditions of our society unfold on a simple mass product like bricks. Its manufacturing process shows us things that shake the social order. It is about ideals, visions and optimisation processes, about nature, man and measurements - the socially strengthening function of work is reflected here, and a new way of dealing with the given is initiated - the worker is no longer just the slave of his conditions. He begins to rededicate himself to it, and thus, at least in fairy tales, escapes his own angular fate.
Content
The photographs in the book 'Human' by Gábor KUDÁSZ carry us away like in a time capsule into the age of manual work, effort and calloused hands. Workers making bricks were photographed from 2014-2016 in Eastern European countries. We see a production machinery spitting out loamy masses of freshly formed, angular products on an assembly line. I can feel the material, the strain and heat, and think of sweat marks, the smell of dust, aprons and old working gloves. But wait – is there something wrong?! The workers, depicted as in a socialist picture book, behave in an unusual way. They begin to alienate their product and interact with it as if the clay block was the prop of a big stage production. They use it for performative games, point out proportions and give measurements – what's going on?" (© Tobias Laukemper, TAZ Futurzwei)
Additional information
The out-of-print first edition of 2018 was followed by the new edition with a new ISBN number in 2021; both editions are limited to 500 numbered copies.