Miklós Erdély

erdely
Ismétléselméleti tézisek und Azonosításelméleti vizsgálatok
(Wiederholungstheoretische Thesen und identifzierungstheoretische Untersuchungen mit Illustrationen), 1972-1973, Serie von 9 Photographien, Schreibmaschinentext auf Papier
Miklós Erdély Foundation, Budapest

This work formulates some of Miklós Erdély’s key ideas. Three photos showing the same motif are arranged repeatedly in vertical rows. The images at the top and bottom are identical, while the one in the middle reveals some slight deviations. The bottom two pictures, according to the brief captions, represent a duplicate and a copy of the original respectively. The photograph at the top is the original, which is why it has no caption relating it to the others. The images trigger shifts in vision; our eyes not only skip from one image to the next in order to compare what is depicted, they also focus alternately on the medium and what is portrayed, taking into account the influence of the captions on what we see. This is a conceptual form of the picture puzzle or optical illusion, one that does not present tilt-effects and other optical phenomena, but the displacement of identity in a process of difference and repetition. Erdély succeeds in doing this by interlocking processes of logic and perception.

Miklós Erdély (1928-1986) lived in Budapest.