Shortly after Gabor Szilasi fled to Canada from Hungary’s oppressive Communist regime in 1959, he found a job at the Office du Film du Quebec. The organization had a broad mandate: celebrating the province’s heritage, documenting official visits and other events and gathering information for the different government ministries. His subjects included major highways, heads of state and agricultural fairs.
“My first assignment for the latter was a disaster,” he recalled. “I had never been to the countryside and was unaware that bovines had to be photographed according to strict codes. I took their portrait as if they were posing for a passport picture. Needless to say, it was not what was expected of me.”
Nevertheless, this introduction to the rural realm enchanted him. Eager to learn more, he took a two-week vacation in 1970 to photograph the bucolic region of Charlevoix, along the western banks of the St. Lawrence River. His project there became the blueprint for his personal work, as he set aside a few weeks every year to explore the province, using a combination of portraits and details of vernacular architecture to translate his impressions and findings.
“I never intended to create a historical archive or an anthropological study,” he said. “I mainly wanted to make photographic documents that would stand as evidence of my own curiosity. Being from another country – Hungary – and another reality – an urban dweller – everything intrigued me. I would notice details that those who are more familiar with these environments no longer pay attention to.”
Deliberate or not, his images constitute a vibrant visual history of the province. With subtlety, his work takes us through the shift from a highly religious, agrarian and English-dominated society to a profoundly secular, consumerist and French one.
Mr. Szilasi, 86, had turned to photography after serving a five-month sentence for trying to cross illegally into Czechoslovakia, an ordeal which prevented him from pursuing medical studies. Instead, he trained his eyes in the streets of Budapest during the 1956 uprising. Seeing his friends targeted by the authorities, he fled to Vienna and obtained a Canadian visa.
When he arrived in Quebec, he was surprised by people’s accents, local architecture and even the fact that butter was salted. Unlike in his hometown of Budapest, bricks in the Canadian province weren’t used only for factories, but also for homes. Buildings mixed elements borrowed from styles popular in England, the United States and France.
“Architecture, interior décors and street furniture, are expressions of one’s culture and beliefs,” he said. “You can tell so much even by looking at a street sign or a telephone pole.”
His work captures those telling details, where both symbols of tradition and signs of change abound. In Charlevoix, he found a community where each room still had a cross hung on the wall. Three years later, in Beauce, the most important object in the house had become the television set.
In Montreal, he recorded the city’s ongoing transformation. In one series, he meticulously photographed the shops along Ste. Catherine Street, a popular commercial strip where stores open and close according to the whims of the consumers.
He also witnessed the rise and fall of the nationalist sentiment in Quebec. His early photographs show that most billboards and signs were in English. By 1977, these were all but gone, in order to abide by new laws that put French first. Yet, he always refrained from partaking in such political discourse.
“As an immigrant, I felt that it wasn’t my fight, nor my place to comment,” he said. “I don’t approach photography as a way to make a political statement. My role is not to judge or advise but to observe.”
Mr. Szilasi is still making pictures. In 2012, he visited Gaspésie for the first time. The turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s has settled and the changes are ever-more subtle. The number of churchgoers continues to dwindle. In a group portrait taken after Mass, only a handful of devotees stand on the steps. A few small mom-and-pop diners are still around, even though chain restaurants abound. Families, whose members once lived close to one another, are increasingly dispersed.
“Everything is in eternal flux,” he noted. “In Saint-Benoît-de-Labre, I met a lovely woman who invited me in for lunch. Her husband had recently returned from a stay at the hospital. He was lying on the couch. She was sitting on the opposite corner. I photographed them. Two weeks later, when I returned to give them a print, no one answered the door. Their neighbor told me that the man had passed away and that his wife had left almost immediately. Nothing is ever fixed. If it’s not recorded, it will be forgotten.”
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