Gabor Szilasi takes a self-portrait in Montreal in 1964.Gabor Szilasi
Sometimes it takes someone from away to see what makes a place and its people unique. Gabor Szilasi, a Hungarian-born photographer, was that person. During a long career, he looked through his lens into the heart of Quebec and turned what was taken as ordinary into iconic images.
Mr. Szilasi, 98, died peacefully on April 10 at his home in Montreal’s Westmount neighbourhood. He had been in failing health for more than a year, but it was never in doubt that he would spend his final days in the place where he had lived for decades. At his side were his wife, Doreen Lindsay; his daughter, Andrea Szilasi; her partner, Michael Merrill; and Mr. Szilasi’s grandson, Lucas Szilasi Merrill.
Mr. Szilasi had a gift that served him well as a photographer – empathy. “The photographs he made sprang from an innate and profound interest in people. The portraits were never overly familiar, never caricatures and never satirical, but always measured and respectful of the individual,” his friend and colleague David Harris said.
Mr. Harris wrote the introduction and a chronology of the photographer’s life in Gabor Szilasi: The Eloquence of the Everyday, a 2009 book that presented a retrospective of the photographer’s work gathered from an exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada. Mr. Harris taught in the photography department at Montreal’s Concordia University and was later a curator at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.
An enduring friendship was born when Mr. Harris came from Toronto to Concordia, where Mr. Szilasi worked at the time. Mr. Szilasi invited Mr. Harris to stay in his home until he found a place of his own. Mr. Harris continued to visit Mr. Szilasi and Ms. Lindsay at their home until last week.
Mr. Szilasi’s photos at first appear straightforward, without affectation. But there is an understanding in them that grew out of a long apprenticeship and a fraught early life.
From 2013: Gabor Szilasi uses his outsider lens to document Canada’s margins
Gabor Janos Szilasi was born Feb. 3, 1928, into a middle-class Budapest family, who experienced the worst the 20th century had to offer. His grandparents were Jewish, and his parents, to escape the antisemitism of the times, converted to Protestantism before Gabor was born. The conversion did not save a brother and sister who died of illnesses during the war, nor his mother who died in a concentration camp. Gabor and his father, Sandor, survived.
Gabor tried to escape Hungary in 1949 but was captured by Communist authorities who had taken over the country. He was imprisoned for five months, returning to Budapest where he worked as a labourer.
In 1952, he bought his first camera and began experimenting with it, taking photos of street scenes and buildings. His early photos are documentary work, records of what the camera sees.
But already he displayed a discerning eye, evident in his 1954 photo of a young man and woman riding a motorcycle, racing out of the frame. She wears a bikini from the era, and he is bare-chested, also in a bathing suit. The background is a blur. They are lithe and youthful. It is a sensual and life-affirming image that lingers in the imagination.
There were harsher realities to record in 1956, when the Hungarian uprising against the Communist regime broke out. Mr. Szilasi was on the street, amid the crowds, taking photos. He made a second, successful attempt to escape Hungary later that year, trekking overland to Vienna. His father followed a few days later, with negatives of the photos his son had taken, hidden in the diaper of a baby of friends who were among the escapers.
Szilasi photographed a nun at the Montreal airport upon his arrival in the city in 1959.Gabor Szilasi
Canada accepted Mr. Szilasi and his father as landed immigrants. Upon arriving in Halifax, Gabor was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Sandor found a job with the Quebec government while his son used his months of recovery in Nova Scotia and Quebec City to study French and English. He also resumed taking pictures, enrolled in photography courses and found his first commissions as a professional photographer.
In 1959, Gabor moved to Montreal, joining Quebec’s Service de ciné-photographie. He was hired as a photographer and darkroom technician and sent on prosaic government jobs around the province. The work allowed him to hone his technical skills, but a more creative impulse was taking shape. Photographing cows on one assignment, he perplexed his bosses when he turned in head-and-shoulders portraits of the beasts instead of pictures of the whole animals they expected.
Mr. Szilasi met his wife-to-be, Ms. Lindsay, an Ontario-born artist, in 1961, and a year later they married. Their daughter, Andrea, was born in 1964. Montreal provided an increasingly full life. Mr. Szilasi joined an amateur orchestra, playing the clarinet. His wife’s contacts in Montreal’s arts community put him in touch with creative people in various fields.
In 1968, while on assignment to photograph Quebec’s covered bridges, Mr. Szilasi saw a man standing outside his house. He stopped and asked for permission to take the man’s picture and then photograph the inside of his house. It was the beginning of the photographer’s signature work.
Commuters seek shelter from a snowstorm on Montreal's Atwater Avenue in 1971.Gabor Szilasi
Mr. Szilasi’s familiarity with rural Quebec and its people gained him entry into the lives and homes of people in areas across the province: Charlevoix, the Beauce, islands in the St. Lawrence River, the Abitibi-Témiscamingue region. The photographs he took gained attention in gallery shows and art magazines. Here were the places Quebecers knew, often through parents or grandparents, reflected back to them.
Portraiture became his medium. To take a picture of someone was not a snap-and-run endeavour. There needed to be understanding and consent between subject and photographer. When he was once asked why, upon returning from a trip to Greece, he hadn’t taken any photos, he told his interlocutor, “because I couldn’t speak the language.”
In The Eloquence of the Everyday, Mr. Szilasi summed up his engagement with his subjects this way: “I like people. I’m interested in their trade, their ways of life, their joys and their problems. … I find that a good conversation brings me closer to a successful photograph than all the knowledge about camera techniques.”
While his fluency in French offered an entrée into Quebec society, Mr. Szilasi stood aside from the political storms language brought to the province. He favoured neither French nor English communities, and his bilingualism served as a bridge between artists in both.
Szilasi photographed members of the Dufour family in Saint-Bernard-de-l’Île-aux-Coudres, Que., in 1971.Gabor Szilasi
As his stature grew, he became more involved with the arts in Montreal and spent less time in the hinterland. He took a job at the junior college Cégep du Vieux Montréal in 1971, moving to Concordia University’s Faculty of Fine Arts in 1979, which led to an assistant professorship.
He counted among his friends the photographers Michel Campeau, John Max, Sam Tata, Tom Gibson and many others. He was a fixture at gallery openings, taking candid pictures of attendees to amass a collection that offered a panorama of the city’s artists. In 2019, the McCord Museum (now the McCord Stewart Museum) made the photos into a book: Gabor Szilasi: The Art World in Montreal, 1960-1980. It is an invaluable record of the era.
Being in Montreal turned Mr. Szilasi toward another longstanding interest: the built environment. He photographed streetscapes and buildings with the same curiosity that he brought to his portraiture. In fact, these photos might be called portraits of his adopted city. They caught its idiosyncrasies – the new and old, the tatty and elegant, rubbing against each other.
Mr. Szilasi’s city photos brought him to the attention of the city’s architectural heritage groups, and he became a friend of Phyllis Lambert, creator of the Canadian Centre for Architecture.
Szilasi, pictured in 2010, was a recipient of that year's Governor-General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press
In this century, he produced fewer new photos but continued making prints, and he appeared in group shows, including with his daughter, Andrea, an artist who works in photography and other media.
He became the focus of attention of fellow artists. In 2006, the Quebec filmmaker Catherine Martin released her documentary The Spirit of Places, in which Mr. Szilasi revisited Charlevoix, talking to people he encountered decades earlier. And in 2021, for the film Gabor, Joannie Lafrenière followed the photographer around Quebec and in a return journey to Hungary.
There were accolades: a Governor-General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2010), a Prix Paul-Émile-Borduas (2009) and the city’s highest honour, a Knight of the City of Montreal (2024).
Perhaps the most enduring recognition will be a mural created in 2024 by Rafael Sottolichio on a building near Concordia. It shows Mr. Szilasi and one of his photos. Now, along with Leonard Cohen and other Montreal celebrities, he has a wall of his own.
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