Gabor Szilasi | The time of honors

Having documented rural and urban life in Quebec for 65 years, Gabor Szilasi is one of Canada’s foremost photographers. And one of the most endearing visual artists, the art world fondly calling him Gabor. The Press met the 94-year-old artist on the occasion of the release, Friday, of the documentary by Joannie Lafrenière which pays tribute to him.

Eric Clement
The Press

His camera has always been an extension of his voice. So he is still photographing. At 94! Of course, less than before, having become more sedentary. Gabor Szilasi – in Hungarian, we pronounce Silachi – must now take his cane or his walker when he leaves his home. We went to eat together in his neighborhood of Westmount and, despite his balance problems, he managed to walk up Grosvenor Street quite easily.

His eyes cause him torment, due to macular degeneration. He spent five months in hospital last year after some sort of stroke. Despite all these hassles, he got back into shape. Not like in the movie Gabor, where we see the nonagenarian doing push-ups! However, he still does exercises every day at home, has an excellent appetite (we have seen!) and retains an inalienable faith in life.

Gabor will be present at the launch of Joannie Lafrenière’s documentary, on May 27, at the Beaubien cinema. He insists on it, because he loved the experience of this film, which he has already watched three times. “The third time was in Toronto, a few days ago, at the documentary festival, the Hot Docs. I was afraid to fall asleep especially since I was in the front row! But no, I still found it interesting. I am happy. The film is well done. We feel that Joannie is a photographer. »

Photography has been an integral part of Gabor’s life and that of those close to him, including his partner, the artist Doreen Lindsay, and his daughter, also an artist, Andrea Szilasi. But had it not been for the communists who took control of Hungary after World War II, Gabor Szilasi would have been a surgeon in his home country. Wishing to live free, he broke through the Iron Curtain in time, in 1956, and came to Canada with his father in February 1958.

He immigrated alone with his father. During the war, his mother had been murdered by the Nazis in the death camps, while illness had carried off his brother and sister. Having learned photography on the job in Budapest, he chose, shortly after his arrival in Canada, to discover Quebecers, with his lens, and thus forget his years of darkness.

Gabor Szilasi is the Quebec photographer who was the first to document long, wide and across life as it was in the regions and in Montreal in the 1970s.

“I had a 4×5 format camera and people usually let me photograph them,” he says, adding that he had unforgettable encounters with Quebecers who fell for this affable portrait painter who spoke French thanks to lessons taken. in Hungary. “When I photograph people, for me it’s important to talk to them,” he says. You don’t need a lot of words to bond, but people are important to me. »

Gabor will have been the photographer of the ordinary world. Of course, he surveyed Montreal’s nightlife from the 1960s to the 1980s, which resulted in a very fine book on the world of art and its openings, produced under the direction of Zoé Tousignant. But it was above all with simple people that he felt most at ease. And with his students. He taught for fifteen years at Concordia and almost ten at Cégep du Vieux Montréal.

Today, Gabor feels the weight of the years, but he takes the vagaries of old age with philosophy.

He spends part of his days reading newspapers and magazines. The Press, The duty, The Gazette, The Financial Times, The New Yorker. “News and current affairs interest me a lot,” he says. Russia is worrying. »

Last year, Library and Archives Canada acquired a large part of its professional archives, namely 80,000 negatives. A tribute to his work and a moving moment that we witness in Gabor, as employees collect boxes of negatives from his studio. When asked how he reacted to this departure of a part of himself, he hides the question. By modesty. And rather says that when he taught, he never showed his photos to his students before the end of the course. “I didn’t want them doing the same kind of work as me,” he says. I wanted to help them develop their own vision. »

Gabor Szilasi will be entitled to another exhibition at the Charlevoix Museum, in La Malbaie, from September 23 to March 31. He has a hundred behind the tie since the start of his career. “This time, it will be large-format photos of Charlevoix,” he says. It’s good. »

Gabor also illustrates how Quebec sees Gabor. A fascinating, endearing artist with great reserve and restraint for which his camera came in handy. Protective. In the film, Andrea Szilasi says that when she confided in her father’s office at Concordia one day when she had problems with her boyfriend at the time, he did not give her advice. nor even answered. He had just said to her: “Go and stand by the window over there”, and he had photographed her!

“For me, it has always been a bit difficult to express myself, so I expressed myself through images,” says Gabor Szilasi.