Description:
Budapest, 1972. Magyar Helikon. 95 p. First edition. In the original dust-jacket. Size: 21 x 25 cm
„In 1968 the photographer György Lörinczy took advantage of the Hungarian government’s decision to relax its rigorous laws on citizens travelling abroad. The result was his book New York, New York , which projected a rather less jaundiced view of the Big Apple than that of many home-grown photographers. As a foreigner’s vision, and in terms of photographic outlook, Lörinczy’s perspective clearly has affinities with that of William Klein, but his manic exuberance seems to run on pure energy, without the psychological tensions that underpin Klein’s more realistic and informed vision of the city. It seems unlikely that Lörinczy saw the work of any of the Japanese photographers of the day, but his book has a similar ‘anything goes’ feeling, akin to the totally spontaneous style of someone like Daido Moriyama, who coincidentally, was photographing in New York around the same time. Lörinczy’s style is rough, raw and uninhibited, in the best stream-of-consciousness manner. But he has nevertheless thought about New York, New York as a books, not only laying it out in a dinamic cinematic style, but employing such devices as printing one ot two pages on tracing paper, or utilizing extreme grain, blur and even solarization. The later, surprisingly, renders his depiction of the city’s energies more rather hallucinatory feeling that Lörinczy seems to have experienced on encountering this most vibrant of cities. Lörinczy clearly had a whale of a time in the headquarters of consumer capitalism, catching up on the 1960s and tasting some of its forbidden fruits, such as rock bands and experimental theatre groups. This excited, carefree, though not naive view of New York makes a refreshing change from the inbred cynicism of the streetwise native”.
(Parr-Badger: The Photobook. Phaidon, 2004.)
