My Story Began on a New Year’s Eve

Since returning from New York, I have hardly given myself a minute to write my blog, even though I wanted to.

Today I originally planned to write about photographing two young fashion models.

But while gathering my thoughts, I suddenly realised that exactly four years ago today — on the afternoon of 31 December 2013, during a New Year’s Eve gathering — my photography career truly began.

To explain how I arrived at where I am today, I need to go into the details.

So this will probably be a long post.

My hope is that somewhere inside my story, somebody will find one idea or one moment that helps them in their own life.

Let me begin with the moment I almost died.

All right, that sounds dramatic.

But it is true.

Until the summer of 2013, my life had been moving forward quite successfully.

I worked in marketing and brought strong results and innovative solutions to my partners.

By then, I had also been involved with photography for almost twelve years.

And I had been running my photo studio for seven.

Then a sports accident put me on an operating table.

From that day onward, I began living like a different person.

Especially after the doctor told me he did not understand how I had survived the impact.

His advice was simple:

Be grateful for every day that comes after this.

A metal implant replaced part of my left elbow.

Nothing was quite the same again.

But my usual optimism stayed with me.

I did not focus on what I had lost.

I focused on what I had gained.

I was alive.

I stopped my marketing activities and placed all my energy into rehabilitation.

Hundreds of times I asked myself where I had gone wrong.

What I should have done differently.

Naturally, there was no satisfying answer.

Then I began asking a different question:

Had I actually gone wrong at all?

Or had I always been longing for something that was already inside me — something I had failed to notice until the accident forced me to see it?

During rehabilitation, I learned something important.

When we ask the right questions, answers often arrive surprisingly quickly — sometimes in the form of signs.

I wanted to live in a way that brought joy or happiness to somebody every day.

Perhaps they would pass that feeling on.

And in that way, as one tiny cog in a much larger machine, maybe I could make the world slightly better.

And perhaps I would have another day tomorrow to do it again.

When the cast came off, the doctor explained that a dull pain might remain in my elbow for the rest of my life.

He recommended daily movement and rotation exercises.

When he demonstrated the motion, something clicked in my mind.

Using a camera requires a very similar movement.

So I began photographing more and more again.

The portrait sessions made many people happy.

Photography became part of my rehabilitation.

But I was not satisfied with the images.

I felt that the people in front of me had more inside them than I was capable of showing.

So I began educating myself consciously and systematically.

Then came 31 December 2013.

I was celebrating New Year’s Eve with my partner and friends.

For several days, I had been asking myself what I wanted to do with the following year.

I started writing down my strengths and weaknesses.

What I loved doing.

What I disliked.

The conclusion was surprisingly clear:

I loved photography.

And I believed I was good at building brands.

So I made a New Year’s resolution and set myself a goal:

I wanted to become “one of the best photographers in the world”.

At the time, I barely dared say that sentence even to myself.

People often react strangely to someone who openly talks about very large dreams.

So instead of fully joining the New Year’s Eve party, I opened my computer.

The first thing I did was register a domain in my own name.

Then I began building a website and trying to explain:

Who am I?

What do I want to give people?

Building yourself as a brand is, in my opinion, one of the hardest branding tasks.

You have to criticise yourself constantly.

And improve constantly.

To this day, I do not really follow competitors closely.

I do not spend much time studying other photographers’ websites or copying how they position themselves.

I have my own small world.

And I try to look at the service from the client’s point of view.

That is how I spent part of that New Year’s Eve.

Working on my website.

I could not review all twelve years of reference images because they were not available on that computer.

So I selected from my newer work.

I believed that if I wanted to become one of the best, then my way of seeing had to reach a much wider audience — first of all in Hungary.

2014 began.

Within the first week, the basic website was more or less ready.

I have been improving it ever since because my perfectionism always finds something I dislike.

I decided the first real step would be a photography exhibition.

I did not know where.

I did not know exactly how exhibitions worked.

I only knew one thing:

I wanted it to happen before my thirty-fifth birthday on 14 May.

At the time, my Facebook page had around 1,200 followers.

I created an event.

The exhibition theme came from an idea by my partner.

I announced that the first thirty brave women over the age of thirty who applied would be included in the exhibition without a selection process.

That alone was not yet attractive enough.

So the marketer in me began working.

What if the women could take their photographs home after the exhibition?

What if the works were produced as high-quality canvas prints?

What if there were an elegant opening where the participants themselves were the centre of attention?

I began researching galleries in Budapest.

There were so many options that eventually I stopped searching.

I was spending huge amounts of time with no result.

Then applications began arriving.

At first, friends and acquaintances volunteered.

That made sense because portrait photography is built on trust.

Once I began posting exhibition portraits of people I knew, their shares started bringing in applicants I had never met.

As I said, I had given up on finding the venue.

Then, within days, the solution found me.

A female painter contacted me after discovering my website.

She asked permission to paint one of the artistic nude photographs I had created because she wanted to include the painting in an exhibition.

We spoke on the phone.

I said yes.

I also thanked her for asking.

At the same time, I did not fully understand why she needed my permission.

Her painting would be her own work.

What inspired it was also part of her creative process.

But one word caught my attention:

Exhibition.

I asked her what she considered the best exhibition venue in Budapest.

She said she had once shown work at Stefánia Palace and considered it ideal.

So I began investigating.

Would Stefánia accept my exhibition?

How does one actually organise something like this?

It took a long road before the phone call finally came.

Yes.

I remember fighting back tears.

I could not believe that somebody as unknown as me would be given the opportunity to exhibit in such an impressive venue.

For International Women’s Day, I received the Stefánia Gallery for three days.

A great many people visited.

The photographs were not yet grand artistic masterpieces.

But for many of the models, they were the best photographs ever made of them.

So in that moment, for them, I was “one of the best photographers in the world”.

Do you see how subjective that idea is?

That was when I realised:

Being one of the best would not be decided by television.

Or by a professional committee declaring it.

For me, it meant creating the best photograph of that person’s life every time somebody stood in front of my camera.

Below, you can see a short behind-the-scenes film about the exhibition made by my colleague László Rudolf Tóth.

The exhibition photographs can also be viewed through the link.

Almost all of my former business partners and friends attended.

I received enormous help from Andrea Aranykovács, head of Stefánia Palace.

Professional photographer József Kiss also helped me with practically everything.

I learned a huge amount from him.

Without him, I would barely have understood how to build an exhibition at all.

The high-quality printing was supervised personally by József Vincze.

My cousin, art historian Dávid Balogh, became curator.

Without him, the exhibition would have lacked atmosphere and a coherent message.

People say:

“When something gets rolling…”

Even during the exhibition, I was already asking myself:

What comes next?

Once you achieve something, people immediately want to know what you will do afterwards.

Then András Noszvai gave me a major opportunity.

He had seen the exhibition material.

Three months later, he was organising an oldtimer car event at the Millenáris Velodrome.

He offered me the chance to create an outdoor exhibition there that matched the theme of the event.

I considered it an enormous honour.

And another positive sign that I should continue along the photographic road.

Thanks to András, our team had already worked as event photographers at many vintage-car competitions.

So after remembering those experiences, the theme seemed obvious:

PIN-UP.

By then, my Facebook page had grown to around 3,500 followers.

Finding thirty participants among the new followers who carried the pin-up spirit was not especially difficult.

With the help of Budapest beauty salon Heaven in Style, we transformed the participating women into playful divas inspired by the 1950s and 1960s.

By the day of the exhibition, I was completely certain I was moving in the right direction.

I was proud of the work.

Once again, I did not create the exhibition alone.

That would have been impossible.

With Judit Osztopányi, we designed how the images should sit within the unusual environment.

They were not meant to dominate the event.

But they still had to work as visual decoration.

Once again, sequencing the images became an important curatorial question.

Art historian Dávid Balogh helped with that too.

I created a short behind-the-scenes video, which you can see below.

The exhibition photographs can be viewed through the link.

And, unbelievable as it sounds, this was where New York first entered the story.

It was early afternoon.

I sat down for a while and watched the car race.

I was thinking about how, less than half a year earlier, all of this had been only a dream on New Year’s Eve.

Now it was real.

So I asked myself:

Is this all I have inside me?

Or can I raise the standard again?

While I was thinking, Frank Sinatra’s “New York” suddenly began playing through the speakers.

I noticed immediately because in 2013 I had heard the song countless times while creating marketing material for a theatre performance about Frank Sinatra.

Then somebody tapped me on the shoulder.

I turned around.

One of the models was standing there with her little daughter.

They had come to collect the portrait so they could take it home.

I handed the photograph over.

The little girl’s face filled with pride because she thought her mother looked beautiful.

As they were leaving, the mother encouraged the girl:

“Go on. Give him what you brought.”

She handed me a keyring.

It was a promotional item from the New Yorker fashion brand that she had received in a shopping centre that day.

That was the moment I decided:

Before the end of that same year, I would create my third photography exhibition.

In New York.

I will write the continuation soon.

For now, it is New Year’s Eve again and we are about to celebrate, so I need to go.

I wish everyone a very Happy New Year!

Part of the BANHALMI ecosystem

For the professional context and practical side of portrait photography, visit the BANHALMI professional website. Related art series, books and exhibitions are preserved in the BANHALMI ART archive.