Confessions of Addiction
The face of addiction rarely reveals itself with such honesty: Zoltán
Tombor’s solo exhibition LOST & FOUND is a relentlessly candid confession
about passion, shame, and recovery. The world-renowned photographer turns
his camera toward his own demons for the first time, using images to tell
how he lost himself—and how he found his way back.
Zoltán Tombor is a Budapest-based photographer. He began his international
career in Milan in 2003, then worked out of New York for several years,
collaborating as a fashion photographer with leading magazines and brands.
His work has appeared in numerous Hungarian and international
publications—including The New York Times, Time, Vogue, and Harper’s
Bazaar—as well as in campaigns and exhibitions. He is the husband of Nelli
Tombor and the father of Lujza Tombor. He has been in recovery for seven
years.
“Lost & Found is the most personal series of my life so far—an act of
exposure and a confrontation with my addiction. The primary aim of the
photographs was to ‘photograph out’ of myself the vast array of
experiences I lived through because of my addiction, so that, when seen as
images, they could become more comprehensible to me as well. This is a
dual world, filled with horror and pleasure alike—an ever-whirling reality
in which, on the one hand, I slowly lost touch with the person who began
drinking and using drugs, while on the other, a new and stronger-than-ever
alliance formed between the substance and me. This series speaks from
intimate proximity about that struggle—about joy and sorrow, ecstasy and
fear of death, craving and forgiveness—revealing the many layers of
addiction,”
the artist explains.
The exhibition functions as a kind of self-confession: through his applied
and autonomous photographic works, as well as his family archive, it
presents a personal account of the years of substance use, the symbolic
phenomena of cocaine and alcohol addiction, secrecy and shame, various
forms of temptation, intense life situations, the hardships faced by those
around him, and the process of finding a way out of addiction.
“Although photography has always been a form of self-interpretation and
thinking for Zoltán Tombor, this process of self-knowledge now comes
clearly to the fore for the first time and becomes a defining creative
theme. In his commissioned work, understandably, personal stories
typically did not appear; in this context, however, some of his fashion
photographs also take on new meanings, pointing to possible points of
connection between the fashion world, show business, celebrity culture,
and substance use,”
emphasizes the exhibition’s curator, Emese Mucsi.
The material exhibited at the Capa Center is neither a documentary series
nor a classic fashion-photography project, but rather a special,
idiosyncratic visual fabric—a visual memoir by Zoltán Tombor, interwoven
with textual elements, reflecting on the years lived so far.
Here, his applied and autonomous works intertwine with nearly fifty-year-
old family photographs, as well as a new photographic series created
specifically for the occasion, composed of symbolic images. Looking back
from the period of recovery from addiction, the life material is
reorganized along an associative inner logic in a conceptual map: happy
and sad experiences, works, projects, and encounters from childhood to the
present.
“Addiction is neither an inherited disease nor the result of choice; it is
a behavioral phenomenon, a response to human suffering. If we want to
understand addiction, we should not look at genes, but at what happened in
a person’s life,”
says Gabor Maté. The fabric of the exhibition also includes selected
statements and case studies drawn from various self-help books addressing
the subject, as well as written elements consisting of Tombor’s own
personal confessions related to addiction.
His principal guides and helpers in the recovery process were physician
Gabor Maté’s book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with
Addiction, and psychiatrist Anna Lembke’s bestseller Dopamine Nation:
Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. Personal confessions—whether
they arise in a book, a support group, or everyday conversations—can in
some way be liberating for both sides: for people with substance
addictions, those in recovery, fellow sufferers, family members, and
seekers alike. This story will certainly bring relief to at least one
person—and perhaps it will have the same effect on others as well.
By Tamas Kaszas
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