“This is the balance”
Photographer Zoltán Tombor’s solo exhibition LOST&FOUND at the Capa Center is about the years of substance use, presented in a confessional mode. Alongside the self-knowledge narrative of a personal fate filled with self-struggle, the desire to meet expectations, and a longing for love, the worlds of fashion, the famous and not-so-famous, the creative individual, and of course family matters also come into view. It is both a reckoning and a transitional zone—consistent with his previous work, yet clearly marking an autonomous artistic career. Zoltán Tombor is a compelling conversation partner, among other reasons, because of the remarkably wide angle through which he views the world.
Sobriety is currently sweeping through here as a trend; many well-known figures openly acknowledge their addictions, and countless podcasts have launched on the subject. You not only talk about it but have also created a visual project. Where did the idea begin? What was the very first thought or impulse from which the Lost & Found project grew?
It’s true that there’s a lot of talk about it nowadays, and it’s an important topic. Mine is not a documentary body of work; it’s more a meditation on addiction, which I know firsthand. I’ve been photographing for a little over thirty years, and I essentially drank my way through those thirty years. I’ve been sober for eight years now; on August 13, I marked my seventh anniversary of sobriety. I hadn’t intended to create an exhibition on the subject—not because it was taboo, or because I didn’t consider photography a suitable medium for expressing deep thoughts. It simply didn’t occur to me to speak about this. Although sobriety made me rethink a series of moral questions, issues of self-knowledge and life management, the nature of support systems, I still didn’t plan to lay it all out in front of others.
But when I read Gábor Máté’s book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts in two days, nodding intensely as I went, I realized that I myself continually struggle with the emotions he describes in such detail and with such clarity. The “aha” moments sparked an inner urge to make photographs about this—to show the sustaining forces around me, what changed in my life when I stopped, how complex it all is—and that I truly can speak about it. I think art is exciting because it speaks differently about things we all know, in ways we haven’t heard before, yet at the same time it affirms our own experiences.
Máté’s book gave me that experience. I read it with great joy and came to recognize a series of connections—or at least something came together in my mind—that I already knew, yet wasn’t fully conscious of, if that apparent contradiction makes sense. That’s when it formed in me that what he could express in words in that book, I could express in images. If it became an exhibition and my photographs went up on the wall, this way of thinking would take on a life of its own; people would start talking about it. That’s the best part. I decided to start photographing and slowly began jotting down my ideas.
What is your working method? Do you first see the image in your head, or do you notice something and photograph it because you find it expressive?
I’m interested in how emotion becomes an image. It’s impossible to explain how what I feel ends up on the wall. It would be false to theorize that for me sadness is green, and then in the next picture you see that it’s blue. Just as with music—you can’t really explain what emotionally reaches you in it. If an image doesn’t come alive on its own, it doesn’t help if I say there’s a black sheep in it because I played that role in the family. If I have to explain why I photographed something in a studio or out in the wilderness—if it doesn’t work by itself—then something’s wrong. It’s also not interesting which image I was freezing or standing knee-deep in mud for.
I’m constantly thinking, writing reminders to myself on scraps of paper, in my phone, everywhere. I have a huge archive from the past thirty years, and I regularly go through that as well. Sometimes specific images by others come across my path; I look at them and immediately think: I’ll do this better, I’ll steal it, copy it—but that water droplet won’t work like that, I’ll do it differently. A million decisions, a narrowing list, words for which I search visual metaphors—and in the end an image is born, ideally with many layers of unspoken references. Maybe it doesn’t need to be dissected and over-explained so much; an image is good if it works, if it has an impact, if it sets your own thoughts in motion, but doesn’t present unquestionable truths.
The material feels partly like stepping inside your head, yet it also follows a narrative—from your childhood to the present.
The exhibition consists of three parts. The first is made up of childhood photographs selected by curator Emese Mucsi from our family archive. The second part includes fashion photographs and commissioned work connected to addiction. The third features images created specifically for this exhibition.
An exhibition about addiction must begin in childhood—even if as an adult I am responsible for my decisions. Most of us have childhood traumas. Mine is that when I was eight, my mother tried to kill herself, and I was the one who found her. Thankfully she is alive today. She wasn’t happy that I shared this publicly, but a trembling fear of death accompanied my childhood—that she might try again. That’s why so many images at the beginning of the exhibition deal with the mother-child relationship, with breast milk—which not only builds our immune system but also forms attachment and provides comfort. Childhood holds so many promises of happiness and security; everything seems perfect, and then inevitably it breaks apart.
But it’s not only my mother who appears here—my wife, Nelli, is also present, pregnant with our daughter Lujza in the summer of 2021, curled in a fetal position. She is both a mother and someone’s daughter; it’s beautiful to understand the cyclical nature of life.
I didn’t build a strict narrative; rather, I wanted to show a broader perspective, even in generational terms. For me, addiction is this vibrating dynamic of many highs and lows: love and ecstasy, guilt and lies, ascension to heaven and descent into hell.
What does the title Lost & Found mean? Is this array of images a kind of database, documentation—or everything you lost and found during the years of addiction?
The “lost property office” association might come to mind; if you look around in my head, there really is that kind of chaos. But these are not random images—the curator selected, installed, grouped, and themed them. A photobook on the subject is also forthcoming, in which alongside the curatorial text I write about my relationship with “the substance,” about the chemistry between us—literally and metaphorically. It’s a bit like a past love: after the disappointment, it goes up on a shelf. We’ve let each other go. We’re old acquaintances, but we’ll never be friends.
I truly had a relationship with substances, but I realized it wasn’t love—it was something toxic and destructive. The chemistry worked, though, and if I weren’t careful, if I let go, I could continue right where I left off. I lost myself and found myself again—that’s mainly what the title expresses.
All the decisions that led me into this came from me; I can’t point at anyone else. I don’t want to blame anyone. I was wounded by things; the emptiness and lack inside me were filled by drugs and alcohol. I’m empathetic toward addicts, since everyone fights their own demons, but I don’t want to shift responsibility. I speak about the journey of finding my way back to myself—if it doesn’t sound too pathetic—to self-love, or to a meaningful life. Another aim was to reduce shame around addiction. Since the exhibition is shown in a museum, a public institution, perhaps I contribute to making it easier to talk about this in public discourse. Many people reach out with encouraging messages, emails, accounts of similar journeys.
I don’t want to turn this into psychologizing; at 52 it wouldn’t be fortunate to lean too heavily on childhood trauma, even if my parents’ divorce and my mother’s instability shook my sense of security and confidence as a child. I constantly compensated—at a fairly high level. As a successful photographer with good talk and a “nothing’s impossible” attitude, I could even trivialize my little tricks and substance use to myself, hide my vulnerability. Meanwhile I was a successful photographer and artist in New York, highly functional, working sixteen-hour days, knowing everyone—life was moving, even racing. Apparently. In the end I was even hiding it from my wife, smoking secretly so no one would tell me, “Listen, this is getting to be too much.”
In the first room, in the childhood section, there’s a photograph I made for this exhibition—a Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy–inspired, classically beautiful black-and-white image of forks suspended from the edge of a glass of water. Many people have a similar childhood memory of a wonderful uncle from afar who shows them a trick. My uncle was Laci Tombor. He studied in Berlin, stayed there, became a successful engineer in Munich, designing turbines for airplanes. Family legend says I resemble him the most, though he was strict and overly pedantic. I must have been about five when he visited and said he would place a coin on the rim of a glass—it wouldn’t fall—and he would hang two forks on it, suspended in midair. I was amazed: that won’t work, that’s impossible, you’re fooling me, Laci! But he did it, and it stayed. Now I understand the physics of it, but back then I believed only he could perform such a real miracle. The experience foreshadowed later disappointments—why dazzle or deceive with illusions instead of explanations? Yet when I created the image now, I suddenly realized: this is balance—that’s what the entire exhibition is about. We try somehow to keep our lives balanced on the edge of existence, and if we tip in one direction, we have to compensate with something. I chose to compensate with alcohol and drugs, but others choose pornography, gambling, workaholism—there are a hundred other solutions.
What brought you down?
A single sentence from my wife, Nelli. I was mentally destroyed; physically I wasn’t that bad, though my hands and legs trembled at times, which I blamed on lack of sleep. Between 2015 and 2018 I traveled weekly between London and New York—you don’t need me to explain how exhausting that is. I was successful, considered a known photographer in London and New York, but the emptiness of the fashion world increasingly oppressed me. I couldn’t manage twenty-hour workdays without substances; I didn’t even notice that I needed more and more. The hangovers grew worse, my guilt deeper, I had to medicate myself more heavily; without sleeping pills I couldn’t sleep.
On August 12, 2018, around three in the afternoon, we were sitting on a downtown terrace. I had my “medicinal beer” in hand—after a liter and a half of vodka and other things the night before, I was trying to stay alive—when she suddenly asked: “When was the last day you didn’t drink anything?”
I thought about it. Since I have a good memory, I knew fairly precisely that in the previous three years there hadn’t been a single day without substance use. A simple question at the right moment. Until then it hadn’t struck me how natural drinking had become—there was always a reason: sorrow, joy, a name day, feeling bad, celebrating, reward, anything. By afternoon I could hardly wait for the moment to relax, then I drank deep into the night. It wasn’t physical withdrawal that drove me; I was suffering more mentally, increasingly tormented by lies.
I told her that from now on I wouldn’t drink for a week. Of course, she didn’t believe me—she’d heard it a thousand times—but this time I kept my word. On the seventh day I slept through the night without sleeping pills.
In the exhibition, on the American wall, you go deeply into this—there’s an image where you appear buried, only your suffering face visible. Is that the lowest point?
There isn’t one single lowest point or bottom of a well—there are many such moments. The “buried” image was actually made here, specifically for the exhibition. But America—with its hamster wheel, roller coaster, bundles of cash, illusions—is indispensable to the process. There was always one more job, another important commission; if I solved those well, then I’d finally be enough.
Several images address the dynamics of addiction: you’re at rock bottom, but if you take the substance, you’re instantly fine. No struggle, no work, no pleading, no need for a good day or for someone else to have one. Everything resolves in a flash. You swallow, snort, drink—and you float. With sobriety, you’re immediately confronted again with the fact that you have to work for everything.
Aggression is present in addiction too—the “leave me alone,” I don’t want the problem, I don’t want responsibility. As long as someone is actively addicted, telling them it’s not good won’t work—because for them it is good. Sobriety begins when you realize you must bear your pain; otherwise you cause pain and injury to others. While you’re addicted, the world is interesting; once you stop, it suddenly becomes boring, and you have to deal with that. While you’re in it, you don’t notice how little else remains in your life. You become isolated. First the wider circle falls away, then you only talk to others who are also using, and eventually just to your dealer.
In the end I was smoking alone in one room while Nelli sat in another, because I didn’t want to have yet another conversation about why I was smoking again. It was a long road to a life without secrets and lies. But now, looking you in the eye, standing among my images, I can say: yes, this was it, this is also who I am—and if you don’t want to, you don’t have to talk to me. I have nothing left to lose. We included an image of cracked New York asphalt that looks as if a superhero just crashed there, leaving an imprint. I think that sums it up precisely.
You worked extensively as a fashion photographer; does aestheticization appear here as well? Does it help create distance?
I don’t want to create distance or deny anything. I love when something is simply beautiful. Fashion, like fine art, is also about associations, not merely object photography. The iconography of conversion, purification, the desire for sobriety resonates with fashion: floating in water, shed snakeskin, the scattered, decaying sculptures in the Epreskert—they are not only beautiful; they contain self-knowledge and struggle, which I engage with daily. Toward the end of the exhibition, my personal world hopefully expands toward the universal, and my background in fashion photography helps with that. It becomes clear how many things one can become addicted to—plastic surgery, eating habits, healthy lifestyles, even self-harm. The point is not what one is addicted to, but recognizing it and consciously maintaining balance. I enlarged a beautiful red rose so that, sub rosa, we may speak confidentially about our dreadful little secrets and self-sabotage.
What does this exhibition give you personally?
It was a long process; we went through the images several times with the curator, selecting, assembling the exhibition and the forthcoming photobook. I’d like to take it to other institutions, abroad as well. This exhibition is a milestone in my art; its confessional nature frees me from the desire to please. There is sustaining power in being able to speak about this topic continuously and finding open ears. I hope that what I reveal about my own suffering can offer something for others to draw from.
Judit Jankó
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