Zoltán Tombor: "I make the problem universal by laying my own torment on the table in black and white"
Visual Arts
By Nóra Terján / October 27, 2025
An internationally acclaimed fashion photographer, Zoltán Tombor now bares the chronicle of his addiction in his grand solo exhibition Lost & Found. We spoke with him about craving and ecstatic madness, the loneliness of immigrant life, maternal connection, and how our relationship to beauty has changed.
You once said that fashion photography is more like decoration—superficial, and unfortunately outdated within minutes. Now you’ve come up with something entirely different: your solo exhibition Lost & Found presents your deeply personal struggle with addiction. When did you reach the point of deciding to get sober?
Over the past fifteen years, I’ve worked on many personal series that weren’t commissions but fascinated me deeply. I photographed Brooklyn end to end, walking with my camera on my shoulder, searching for every corner that didn’t feel European. I tried to understand that entirely different world where I often felt very much alone.
I’ve been photographing for thirty years and have been sober for eight. In the five years before that, my addiction hadn’t yet affected my work, but it led to many arguments with my wife, Nelli, which started to weigh heavily on us.
As I spiraled deeper into addiction, I had less and less energy and found it harder to focus. I traveled frequently between New York and London, and with the constant time shifts I became dependent on sleeping pills—while also drinking heavily, using drugs, and downing ten to twelve coffees a day. We were in Budapest in August 2018 when, after a heavy night, I tried to ease my hangover with a "hair of the dog." Nelli asked me when I’d last had a day without drinking. I couldn’t remember—and realized that for three years, there hadn’t been a single day when I wasn’t at least tipsy.
What kind of void were those stimulants trying to fill in your life—and when did you first think about turning this into a photo project?
The idea first occurred to me about two years ago. After five years of sobriety, I came across Dr. Gábor Maté’s book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. During sobriety I’d often reflected on what addiction is—what void we try to fill with substances. What is it that we cling to so desperately, that drags us further and further down?
I carry many childhood traumas. Because of my mother’s unstable mental state, I had to grow up too soon—that’s the emptiness I tried to fill.
The danger of drugs and alcohol is that they give you what you crave instantly—you don’t have to work for it. For me, the scales always tipped toward yearning and lack, so I began compensating for the loss.
The book opened my eyes. I spoke with many people recovering from or relapsing into addiction, delved into the literature, and decided to document my journey—hoping to uncover connections I couldn’t without images. I gathered the wide range of emotions, thoughts, and realizations that defined that period—from desire to deceit, from ecstasy to guilt.
I started collecting metaphorical and symbolic elements in my head and then began photographing them. Along the way, I realized it would be even more interesting to include images from my archive that resonated with certain aspects of addiction.
A complex vision started to take shape: childhood, my parents, depletion, ecstatic madness, realization, the longing for purity, and finally sobriety. Around that time, I reached out to the Capa Center and curator Emese Mucsi, with whom I’ve been shaping this exhibition over the past year.
You taught yourself photography, and in 2003, after an accident, you realized that when you had once dreamed of becoming a photographer while looking at Helmut Newton’s work, you’d wanted more than what Hungary could offer. So you packed up and moved to Milan—without speaking Italian. Were you really betting everything on one card?
Early in life I had to take on roles where I couldn’t just be a child who goes home with problems and gets help—I had to act like an adult. That’s probably why I instinctively look for quick and efficient solutions. No matter how tough the task, after the initial panic comes a precise plan.
After my 2003 motorcycle accident, confined to bed for two months, I started thinking about what forces had steered me toward photography—and where I stood after eight years of working in Hungary.
I felt I had done almost everything possible in fashion and portrait photography there, and I wanted to test myself internationally. Italy fit my temperament—with its music, culture, cuisine, and proximity by car. I didn’t speak a word of Italian, but in fashion, everyone speaks English.
Once I moved, reality hit: I struggled for two years without work, took on depressing gigs, and slowly built connections until an agency signed me and better jobs came in. After eight years in Milan—two of them with my wife—we drunkenly decided one morning to "go for America." After some strategizing, we crossed the ocean hand in hand and lived there for almost nine years.
You mentioned that you felt lonely in America. What was life like there?
The U.S. is distant in many ways—not just in time zones, but culturally and socially too. Moving there is as extreme as relocating to China or India. Eventually you find your community and integrate, more or less—but the process felt like watching our daughter Lujzi, at a year and a half, trying to force a triangle into a round hole in her shape sorter. I was trying to fit into something I simply didn’t belong to.
New York is the center of the world—home to the most important art agencies. Being "New York-based" sounds convincing to international clients. My art gained a higher profile, and I grew increasingly attached to a world I never truly felt part of.
To me, American reality is cold, barren, emotionally repressed—a society that measures people solely by performance. I could never bridge that emotional and cultural void and always saw myself as a foreign immigrant, which my environment only reinforced. Looking back, I’m glad I boxed in that ring—it taught me a lot about what truly matters, precisely because it lacked so much of it. It was an education—a tough university I’m glad to have graduated from.
Your Homeward series was the first to move away from the magazine world toward a more personal tone.
I asked my friend, model Barbara Palvin, to help me revive our Hungarian roots—she had also been living in New York for years. Barbi is bold, direct, funny, and effortlessly embodies what it means to be a cool Eastern European woman.
I had a vision of a childhood love reminiscent of my summers in Zánka. The series connects to homesickness, our mother tongue, campfires, sticky watermelon, first kisses—memories tied to boundless freedom and happiness that I’d almost buried.
Life in America—with its different people, rhythms, and culture—had made me forget. This project became both an act of remembrance and of finding my way back. When I began photographing Homeward, Nelli and I had already decided to return to Hungary—which we did in December 2019.
After the pandemic, #MeToo, and similar movements, social dialogue changed dramatically. How do you see fashion photography today?
Since moving back from New York, the world has changed enormously—especially after the pandemic. Our relationship to beauty has shifted, as has what’s considered acceptable when commenting on a model’s appearance.
In the fashion world, that kind of evaluation is now heavily sanctioned; sexiness and attractiveness must be treated as if they don’t exist. I now follow only a few of my old favorites—photographers who still think when they pick up a camera. The mass-produced, shallow, and uninspired magazine shoots have lost their appeal, even for the public.
There used to be a demand for visually interesting, aesthetically refined, and conceptually relevant images. In today’s fast, hyperactive social-media-driven fashion culture, nobody seems to care anymore.
Do you feel more at home now in fine-art photography?
The essential difference is that in one case, you’re decorating for money; in the other, you’re expressing yourself intellectually. Fashion photography is commercial—it’s about making something look better than reality. We sell dreams.
Art photography, on the other hand, involves observing a universal issue—or something deeply personal—and analyzing it through the lens. The camera helps you interpret and explore.
You’re addressing an audience, but not for profit—you’re expressing yourself and taking a stand through your images. They’re two very different things, even if made by the same photographer.
I don’t mind if my art photography sometimes looks like fashion photography. Its relevance depends on how elegantly I solve visual problems, how deeply I can think, and how effectively I can make that vision bear fruit in the cultural space. That’s a matter of intelligence—not of where or for whom you work.
You became emotional at your exhibition opening, thanking the Capa Center for showing your work. Do people in the fine-art scene treat you differently because you came from fashion?
Among the high-art elite, there’s a bit of the same attitude conservatory musicians have toward rap: "We get that you make music too—but what are you doing here?" I’m trying to enter a world I wasn’t originally part of.
My first step toward art was the Homeward exhibition, followed by Light Therapy (2021), about the pandemic. That also used models and had traces of my fashion background—but it already reflected contemplation, analysis, and engagement with a shared social issue.
My current work on addiction doesn’t try to be aesthetic at all—despite twenty years in fashion.
How would you describe your personal style?
It’s humanly emotional, transparent, simple—perhaps even minimalist in an aesthetic sense. But what I think of my own pictures matters least. What’s important is what I discover through conceiving, shooting, and interpreting them. Once they’re out in the world, judgment belongs to the audience.
What do you hope viewers will take from your exhibition and your journey?
In visual art, once an image is hung on a gallery wall, it demands attention. Your relationship with it changes—because the viewer sees it as an artwork and tries to connect with it.
The main goal of my work is to draw attention to the issue—addiction. I make it universal by laying my own torment and experience on the table in black and white.
These are my thoughts and emotions—dramatic, diverse, sometimes impossible to untangle.
Addiction is a deeply complex social problem. Mine involved substances and alcohol, but it could just as easily be about pornography, the internet, gaming, or even socially sanctioned addictions like workaholism.
A gambler is condemned by society, but a workaholic or a slim, eating-disordered young woman often receives praise. I invite the audience to reflect with me—through my images—on a subject that is deeply personal yet socially vital.
Is there a particular image in the exhibition that’s especially meaningful to you?
Three come to mind. The first shows a ladder and its shadow on the ground. The human desire for advancement—to always climb one level higher—pervades addiction as well. The dark shadow symbolizes the fall, the landing; the self-enclosed shape represents cyclicality. From the outside it’s angular, but inside it’s round.
Another photo shows me floating in the Danube. It speaks of loneliness and isolation—states that, in the depths of addiction, felt almost comforting.
The third depicts my pregnant wife in a fetal position. I lacked maternal connection and strive to do better than my parents could. The portrait sits among a group of images: an egg symbolizing birth, my own childhood photo representing innocence, mother’s milk and unconditional care, the umbilical cord and motherhood as a supreme spiritual bond. Through Nelli’s nude, statue-like image, the nightmare of my own childhood softens, and I keep repeating to myself that our daughter Lujza must get the best version of her father.
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