About photographer Zoltán Tombor’s new exhibition, Lost & Found
“I would already be finished if I hadn’t stopped there.”
Confessions about addiction is the subtitle of the exhibition at the
Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, which brings together the
most personal works to date by photographer Zoltán Tombor. After achieving
everything he could at home as a fashion photographer, then conquering
Milan and making it in New York, Zoltán has been working for several years
now on his own creative projects. In this process, the self-revelation
shown by these photographs marks a new level.
Landscapes, padlocks, built environments, roses, snapshots from childhood,
self-portraits submerged in various materials, and arms and legs covered
in scars all tell the story of what it means to be addicted—and to recover
from it. It is as if all this can only be spoken about through symbols.
Yes, I wanted to find metaphors, because we’re talking about a process
that doesn’t necessarily have visible signs. With the burned children’s
legs or the forearm bearing the scars of self-harm, I wanted to capture
healing: an image that shows something terrible happened before, but now
you’re okay. A surgical scar, despite all its horror, already carries a
kind of positive overtone. For me, addiction meant that something was not
right, something I healed from—but the tissue, my soul and my spirit, that
went through this process still bears the marks. Addiction also has a
physical dimension: your skin, for example, your weight, and how you feel
in your body.
Do you see these scars on others? Can you recognize an addict or a
recovering addict?
Perhaps the sadness in their eyes. The trauma. You can see that something
bad happened and now they’re pretending it’s okay. But sometimes they can
deceive you: there are addicts who can play the role of someone who has
already quit.
The exhibition is also thematically structured; it has clearly
recognizable—and decodable—sections, such as childhood, the American
dream, spirituality, or sex addiction, which appears as a separate topic.
It’s not only about sex addiction there, but also about how sex is
completely different with drugs. You enter a floating state, you feel
freer, it lasts longer, and the orgasm is more intense. And cocaine
creates desire even if you didn’t feel horny before. Substance addiction
is dangerous precisely because you don’t have to do anything to get where
you want to be. You just press the button and you’re there. That’s also
its downside: you have no knowledge of the place you’ve arrived at. You
didn’t have to overcome laziness at dawn before going for a run, you
didn’t have to push through the distance, you didn’t have to practice
self-control—you just arrived at the state you normally feel after
running.
When did you first experience this feeling?
Very early. I had sex for the first time at nine, with a fourteen-year-old
girl. After that, I only really became a “big boy” at seventeen, but it
was already in me early on. I started drinking at fourteen or fifteen at
Lake Balaton. I hated the taste of alcohol, but I loved its effect. I
started partying in my twenties; at first I only used cocaine
occasionally—it was still considered something special in Budapest at the
time—then I started photographing. I became successful quickly, shooting
campaigns, working for fashion magazines. Then, at thirty, a serious
motorcycle accident made me realize I’d hit a wall at home. After that I
left the country and moved to Milan. That’s really where I began drinking
as a lifestyle, when I couldn’t imagine dinner without a bottle of wine.
But it only became a real problem in the last three years.
What kind of problem?
It’s hard to say—just like it’s hard to say when it began. It’s a vortex
you sink deeper and deeper into, while at the same time drifting further
away from rationality. I sometimes cry when I talk about this—don’t let it
bother you, it’s part of the process. So at first there’s just a crack
between the highly functional, workaholic photographer Tombor Zoltán and
the tipsy Zoli. But the former drifts farther and farther away, and I get
stuck somewhere in between. Then I start slipping into drunk Zoli, because
that’s where I feel more comfortable. The guy sitting across from you now,
looking you honestly in the eye, fully aware that he has nothing to lose,
slowly disappears, and it becomes harder and harder to identify with
him—because there you have to make decisions, seem competent, and behave
like an adult. The environment reacts to this too: the wider circle of
friends disappears, you party only with a narrower group, then you start
enjoying being alone with the stuff. I’d sit down at the computer, snort a
line, drink a vodka soda, retouch photos and watch films while Nelli
(Tombor Nelli, model, chef, Zoltán’s wife – ed.) was already asleep. I
sank deeper and deeper into this chemical cocktail and detached from my
surroundings, as if I were in a spacesuit. I would be finished if I hadn’t
stopped there. At most I had one or two years before Nelli would leave me
and the work would dry up.
Did Nelli pull you back in the end?
At the time we’d been married for five years, and I think she might
already have felt that substances had become more important to me than she
was—even if that wasn’t true. Fortunately, I never got to the point of
vomiting on myself or soiling myself, or disappearing for days, or having
to be picked up from the metro—though these things do happen to otherwise
very reliable, adult people. But I also didn’t get to the point where
Nelli would start wondering what life would be like without me, because
she didn’t want to be part of this anymore.
So you didn’t hit rock bottom?
No, I woke up before that. And I didn’t go to therapy either; I got myself
out of it alone. It was a hard task.
How did you manage without asking for help?
It helped that Nelli stood by me the whole time, encouraged me, and the
books I quote from in the exhibition also helped—but even so, you have to
go through this process alone, just as you have to make the decision
alone. I had quite heavy burdens from childhood. My mother attempted
suicide when I was eight, and I found her. I broke down the door. The
ambulance took her away, they saved her life, but until I was sixteen I
lived in constant fear that my mother would be dead by the time I got
home. One day I had enough, turned against it, and shook off that
responsibility. But I wonder who can do that at such an age—being a
parent, a partner, a caregiver, a support to your own mother—even if she
didn’t do it to hurt me, but because she couldn’t cope otherwise. My
father fell in love with another woman, left my mother, and they divorced.
The result was that I had to grow up early, and by the time I reached the
point where I had to get rid of my addiction, I already knew this would be
a lonely fight too.
On August 12, 2018, at 3 p.m., while clutching a bottle of beer—and having
gone through two grams of cocaine and a bottle of vodka the night
before—and being so hungover I could barely see, Nelli looked at me and
asked: “When was the last day you didn’t drink?” I thought about it, and
although I have a pretty good memory, I couldn’t name a single such day
going back three years. “Wasn’t there a Tuesday when it just turned out
that I ordered a lemonade and we went to bed?” I asked, stunned. And the
crazy thing is: if you told me now, let’s just have a shot of pálinka, a
different Zoli would be sitting here with you. Not because I’m crazy or
weak, but because I have a different relationship to intoxication than you
do.
In the exhibition we can also read quotations from books that helped you
get sober—by Dr. Gábor Máté, Sándor Márai, Anna Lembke. Can these really
change a person’s life?
I’m convinced that help doesn’t only come from sitting opposite a doctor
who puts you back together. It’s just as important when a sentence reaches
you at the right moment and hits home, and through it you realize
something. I hope this exhibition can mean that for others. You look at an
image and say: Fuck! Though anyone looking for the fashion photographer
Tombor Zoli in it might be disappointed.
We’ve never seen such self-exposure from you before. Why now?
I’ve been sober for seven years. I have this counter on my phone that I
sometimes look at, and it fills me with a good feeling. Look: 2,627 days
without drinking—that’s quite a lot, right? Even 27 days is a hell of a
lot if you like to drink. But society and our environment are so addicted
that it comes up daily—people want to know how I did it. They want to know what the traumatic turning point was that set it all in motion—but I
didn’t have one. What may have been an important factor is that I still
have a lot of plans for life. I really do photograph well, and I still
have a huge amount to do in this field. So it made sense that I had to go
through this.
Wasn’t it hard to take this on publicly?
We’ll really find that out now, when Google throws up “Tombor Zoli
addiction” next to my name. But obviously I calculated and planned for
that. On the other hand, this is a major exhibition at an important
institution, and an album is also being made from it.
Did it make you a better artist?
I don’t think so. I think it’s like this: if you’re thinking about whether
to have a child or not, have one. If you’re thinking about whether to quit
substances or not, quit. Experience it. Live through it. Everything. Yes,
get high. Get drunk. Cheat on your partner. Let them cheat on you. Lose
someone important. Win someone you thought was unattainable. The more
experiences you have, the more complex your view of life becomes, and
ideally the more complexly you can show it. But we don’t make art just for
ourselves, not just to be applauded, but for the community too—to make it
see something it didn’t dare to before. After all, I’m compromising myself
here, letting people into the secrets of my life! That’s why there are
padlocks among the images—my life was full of secrets. We didn’t talk
about what was going on with my mother, then we hid my addiction too. But
if we show what we struggle with, it’s not only an act of courage, it also
has an educational intent. It’s better for everyone to know what’s there,
where others don’t dare to go. It just shouldn’t come across as self-pity
or self-glorification, another pose of “oh, how damaged I am”—that’s what
has to be avoided.
Dorka Gyárfás
“If we show what we struggle with, there is not only courage in it, but
also an educational intention.“
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