Sylvia Plachy
Blending art with journalism, Sylvia Plachy's photographs document her search for what she terms "a kind of perfection, a harmony in the world." Born in Hungary in 1943, she fled the country with her family in 1956, after Soviet troops crushed the fledgling Hungarian Revolution. After emigrating to the United States in 1958, Plachy started a career in photography in 1964, encouraged and mentored by fellow Hungarian expatriate André Kertész. She quickly became a key participant in the New York photography scene, with pieces published in the Village Voice, the New York Times, and the New Yorker. Her work has spanned a broad range of subjects, from intimate portraits to the life of the streets, many of them published in her "Unguided Tour" column, which ran in the Village Voice for nine years. A collaboration with journalist James Ridgeway led to her photographic study of the sex trade, documented in the book Red Light 1996. Much of her work derives a unique feel from her use of a Holga, an inexpensive plastic camera that imbues photographs with a peculiarly moody but timeless feel. In 2004, Sylvia Plachy published "Self Portrait With Cows Going Home", a photographic exploration of the complex relationship between her forty years of life as a photographer and her identity as a Hungarian exile.
