From shots that evoke Renaissance paintings to portraits that hark back to the earliest days of photography, looking at Szilveszter Makó’s photographs is like being transported back in time. These images are the result of a unique practice, in which he uses mostly natural light, handmade materials, and tangible set design. Here, Makó tells Claire Marie Healy about his creative upbringing and the collaborative effort behind his one-of-a-kind images.
When it comes to the methods behind the hand-crafted aesthetic of his striking photographs, Szilveszter Makó will keep his secrets. “I stumbled upon this technique a very, very long time ago,” he says. “Very few people process images in this way, these days, because it’s so tiring!” The photographer’s images possess a unique quality that is hard to pin down: painterly, absurdist and theatrical, they appear more like work belonging to an Italian dynasty, or emerging from a Dadaist salon, than commissioned for fashion magazines. Whether they frame the craggy visage of Willem Dafoe in a dolls house, encase Cate Blanchett in a bow-wrapped paper package, or transform Monica Bellucci into a still-life of the breakfast table, Makó’s are portraits that call out, in the least, for a gilded acanthus frame.
“I like true materials,” the Hungary-born, Milan-based photographer says. But it’s not that the texture of Makó’s work entirely stems from analog techniques—he makes reference to an old-school editing program for his retouching—but that he employs tools in their making that others may deem obsolete. He loves everything to feel as natural and tangible as possible, using mostly recycled and handmade materials in his set design, and lighting his subjects with daylight in nearly every situation. “Without my natural light, I start to sweat,” he says, laughing. “That’s why I love to bring photoshoots here to Milan, as everything is very much in my control,” other than inclement weather outside the window (“Yes, I can’t control the clouds,” he admits.) And if a back-up should be needed, there is another technique that is banned in Studio Makó: flash is the photographer’s “perfect enemy,” but mastering lighting is everything.
Makó threads his creative point of view—and respect for the organic—as far back as his childhood and teenage years, spent in the small town of Lillafüred. “It makes you peaceful inside,” he says of his unconventional educational environment. “It was so close to nature, we did so many arts and crafts, and we learned languages like Ancient Greek and Latin. It provided a very interesting point of view on today’s world.” Makó cites this schooling—and one beloved Physics teacher—for allowing him the space to find the medium that suited his personality. Fine art was a passion, but not a fit; a stint making photographs at an art school in Hungary ended early when it became clear that there was no room for an interest in fashion on the curriculum. “I’m not a very patient person,” he says. “I want it fast. So painting is not the right genre for me.”
There is an undeniable art historical beauty in Makó’s photographs, however, which seem to time-travel between centuries. In his earlier work, models brandish swords like Renaissance frescoes of war (in which the Roman generals happen to be ethereal-looking women); more recently, the photographer prefers to nod to the very earliest days of photography, with monotone or color-faded compositions that bring to mind portrait studios at a 1920s county fair (complete with paper moon). In an era of same-old campaigns and cover images designed for seamless digital feeds, Mako’s style brings tangible theatricality back into fashion. Such photographs are pure theater, but not because they pile on more and more—rather, because they are deliberate.
Makó may be forming silhouettes and compositions so bold that they can be seen from the nosebleeds, but he executes them with precision, with each and every element in harmony. “I’m a very intense person,” he says, “I like to deliver images that have this element of fantasy but are still balanced.” A comparison with the theater is no accident, but rather runs deep in the spirit of collaboration he brings to every set (it’s worth noting that in post, he does everything himself). Something that connects Makó’s approach—and the hinge upon which the power of many of his images rest—is the emphasis on painstakingly handcrafted work. “I am not enough by myself,” says Makó. “I have to have the team. Everybody on set who actually assists by hand—who are behind each and every brushstroke on the cardboard—is very, very important. Without this, everything falls.”
In the photographer’s research folders lately, you’ll find the sketches and extant documentation of Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet from the 1920s, in which the human dancers hover somewhere between bodily forms and abstract geometry. That eminent Bauhaus figure once spoke of his daring work deriving from a “longing to find the form appropriate to our times.” Makó’s body of work to date may be reminiscent of oil paintings or daguerreotypes from past eras, but there’s one aspect that makes it supremely valuable in our own: the fact that, in a culture that places a premium on oversharing, he has kept his exact methods in the dark.