Portraits of Ferenc Seman

2002

I mostly saw Ferenc Seman at exhibitions in our city. He impressed and inspired me enormously with the energetic force of his bohemian aristocracy, with his courage to voice his personal aesthetic perceptions aloud. Flamboyant, candid, independent. He embodied a vivid, mystical path into an incredibly strange and fascinating world.

In 2002, at a vernissage, I proposed making a series of portraits of him. He agreed at once: «Come to my home. Let’s try.» By then he had already seen one of my works — a portrait of the painter Pavlo Bedzir. That is a story in itself: he saw the portrait at a city photo exhibition, walked up to it, unceremoniously took it off the wall and said: «There! Now that is a strong photograph!» And he asked to be photographed with it.

So I came to Seman’s home. We were talking, and the conversation turned to his thin body… «Misha, I am not ashamed of my body. Not at all. I feel wonderful in it. Everything is f i n e with me», he says. «Then perhaps take off your shirt? Let’s do a bare torso», I suggest.

«I can undress completely!» he says, and starts taking off all his clothes. Stunned, I follow the swarm of my own thoughts: he is such a famous artist! And here he is undressing so casually in front of a 22-year-old boy!… Reading my unease, Seman declares firmly: «If you are truly an artist, then you know what to do with this!» On top of it all his wife Katya comes in and looks me over suspiciously, but Seman delicately tells her to close the door. «It has to be this way» — that was all he explained to her. We started working. For two hours he talked about his brick wall, signed by every important person who came to visit him, about his son who lives in America, about stories from his artistic life…

We said goodbye, and I told him that as soon as I developed the film I would present him the photographs. When I printed them and brought them, he was deeply, deeply moved. «This is truly professional work», he kept repeating. His wife was moved too. «How elegant this is! And I did not believe in it», she said with delight. Warm relations formed between us, and two years later Ferenc Seman was gone.

Seventeen years passed before this series of photographs was seen by the world. But it was right then, at Ferenc Seman’s home, that I first vividly felt that taste of personal style in portrait photography — a taste that fills me to this day and shapes my art.

Photographs of the series