Péter Nádas’ near-death expertise: This is the way you {photograph} the afterlife | EUROtoday

Péter Nádas has interwoven the textual content passages of his quantity “Witnesses of the Light” with three verses from the Gospel of John. One is devoted to the physique, one to the phrase, the third to the sunshine. The connection to his work as a photographer and author is apparent. If you understand that Nádas was clinically useless for 3 and a half minutes in 1993 after a coronary heart assault on the road, you additionally perceive the connection to the primary quote from the Temple of the Body.

Nádas has dealt along with his near-death expertise greater than as soon as in articles when he was 51 years previous on the time and made it the central motif of his e book “Your Own Death” in 2002. Now, one might say, the interpretation into photos follows: with snapshots of maximum gentle and shadow performs on the intersection of abstraction and spirituality. But you possibly can already hear Péter Nádas calling for a cease: “Not so fast!”

It’s a truism that pictures does not work with out gentle. But Péter Nádas has taken the supposedly banal information right down to the restrict of obsession, in texts in addition to in footage, and the sunshine flashes time and again within the titles of his books. A very good twenty years in the past, “Some Light” was the identify of his retrospective picture quantity with images primarily from his time as a photograph reporter in Hungary in the course of the communist dictatorship.

Perhaps, it was speculated on the time, his view of sunshine and darkish was defined by the political scenario. In this a part of his work, vivid gentle doesn’t assure an excellent ambiance, nearly as if it had been like an interrogation lamp, whereas the darkness in his work doesn’t essentially symbolize evil, however can provide safety. Why, one may assume, the shadows on the likeness of a lot of his portraits, that are generally tough to penetrate?

A very good ten years in the past, the textual content and picture quantity “Light Story” adopted, during which Nádas used two characters, the previous Japanese Akahito and his historic and bitterly evil grasp, to make use of their phrases to develop a faculty of seeing. Perception is outlined there because the “ability to recognize lighting conditions”. Composition, however, needs to be nothing apart from “increased perception, savored to the utmost”. The grasp calls this a “careful act of love” and calls for: “The exposure must be knowledge.”

And a lot later, on the finish of a convoluted dialogue of sunshine and shadow, gentle and darkish in such extremes that entry, i.e. penetration, is made inconceivable for the attention in each instances, he takes the conclusion that there isn’t a element within the image that doesn’t lead out of the image one step additional: “The darkest and lightest spots in the picture lead out of the picture in the metaphysical sense of the word, while the objects that cast shadows lead out of the picture in the physical sense.”

So what did he select for his newest illustrated e book, the textual content of which he concludes with the verse: “And the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not understood it.” First of all, one may say, they’re research of shadows, how one window cross after one other stands out towards the brilliant backlight, every with frayed outlines, not with the razor-sharp contours of paper cuts, however with shapes and surfaces that the sunshine actually breaks up, no: tries to melt.

As if gentle and darkish reached out and merged collectively. But the phrase “window cross” had already been used earlier than, from which it is just a tiny step in thought to finish up in Golgotha. And then Nádas casually jumps over the chained viewer in Plato’s cave to land instantly within the glare of divinity.

Nádas was useless for 3 and a half minutes. What was that like? You stay alone, he writes, with the complete content material of your consciousness. In the absence of notion, there isn’t a universe apart from the content material of consciousness. From this it follows that the complete content material of human consciousness is similar with the entire historical past of its bodily notion and its conceptual grasp. Full Story: This is not any much less “than infinity that has existed since eternity.” And later: “I survey how I am integrated into the cosmic.”

The aged and bitterly evil grasp had forbidden the self-destructive gaze instantly into the solar and as an alternative demanded the required confrontation with pure darkness. Now Nádas continues. Now he’s involved with one thing substantial and he ventures again to the time earlier than the Big Bang. But how do you say that? How do you signify that? In a poplar tree, firmly rooted on the financial institution of a river and with its crown near the sky, it appears to have discovered one thing like a temple of its personal. And if not this poplar, which is “not a sanctuary” to him, he a minimum of dedicates a number of images to timber in his backyard at evening, how they eerily attain out with naked branches and twigs within the moonlight – providing assist in addition to looking for it.

But Péter Nádas savors the daylight in all its sides and varieties to the acute, the way it dances on window frames and doorways in order that it sparkles and sparkles and burns. And as soon as, it appears to actually penetrate a wall with its dazzling glow, as if a gate had been opening into one other world. Maybe you must be useless to acknowledge such motives.

Péter Nádas: “Zeugen des Lichts”. Translated from Hungarian by Heinrich Eisterer. Verlag Thomas Reche, Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz 2025. 80 pages, illustrations, hardcover, €46.