When the Budapest-based photographer Éva Szombat found the fashion of her childhood reemerging in 2017, she was teaching photography at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design. Around campus, she saw young students who were dressed like her parents in the 1980s and 1990s. She found that people who never existed in that era were passionate about its objects and clothes, they were “nostalgic for a time they never experienced”. It was an echo of the past, and now, Éva has curated the nostalgic delirium of the present.
The point of the project is repetition, or as Éva calls it: “the idea that everything that surrounds us has already been experienced once, that what others treasure has already been our object of use, and that what once meant a lot is devoured by the institution of nostalgia and reproduced as a copy”. It’s an idea that was made popular by Jean Baudrillard and later, Mark Fisher, who described the present as “eternal”, never truly progressing due to a cultural fascination with nostalgia. It’s a type of microwaved past. “Echo In Delirium deals mainly with the object culture and design of the eighties and nineties, when the Eastern European region went from socialism (in western culture they often call it communism) to capitalism,” says Éva.
The book is filled with gorgeously glossy collections of cultural ephemera, trapped in liminal spaces that transcend time. A wax mannequin of a flexing Arnold Schwarzenegger, kitschy murals of Mr Bean painted on wooden doors, clunky hunks of early computers and fading paintings of tropical beaches hanging over crumpled posters of Leonardo DiCaprio – all of these insightful photographs (shot on a small analogue camera) present the chokehold of the past on the present, objects and aesthetics that have stopped and stayed way past their cultural expiry date. When Éva caught the red-eye effect in her subjects, she didn’t want to retouch it, as this visual flaw reminded her of the “ruined images of the past”.