Over a period of three years, I followed the youth of Havana, Cuba, with my camera. The images capture young Cubans on the verge of breaking free—or already breaking free—from restrictive ways of living and subtle forms of oppression. What happens when there’s no revolution, but there is information—arriving in its simplest, most accessible form: images of mass culture, sports, consumption, and the material world, all shining as a desirable ideal? Many of them have already left. But what happens to those who choose to stay?

The photos are paired with intimate interviews with the individuals portrayed. Because the sun may rise tomorrow continues the story begun in Seven hundred meters (2023), a photographic series offering snapshots of contemporary Cuban youth.

main publications:
https://qubit.hu/2025/03/01/kubai-fiatalok-akiknek-a-deszkazas-es-a-szorf-jelenti-a-lazadast
https://hvg.hu/360/20250302_szasz-lilla-kuba-eltunnek-a-forradalom-vivmanyai

 

In 2016, Cuba’s government, which tightly controlled access to information and technology, set up state-run Wi-Fi hotspots across Havana. Before that, news, culture, and trends from the outside world only trickled in slowly. Suddenly, teenagers had access to a flood of information, ideas, and global trends. Since most homes still don’t have internet, teens flock to the city’s 35 Wi-Fi hotspots. “700 meters” is the length of Calle G and Paseo del Prado, where the kids I photographed usually gather. For them, those 700 meters are the stretch of freedom and joy. In the future, it might also become the place of change.

Seven hundred meters is about these young people and their tight-knit circles of friends, who still believe in the power of their community. In their 20s and 30s, they stand as intermediaries between an ingrained socialist mentality and the increasingly restless, anxious Cuban mindset of today. Getting close to them was a fascinating, delicate journey into a loss of direction—a journey into the sad but beautiful connection between their realities and the country they were born into.

In 2025, I returned to Havana to photograph them again, but by then, many had left the country. The series I made about those who stayed—Because the sun may rise tomorrow—, is accompanied by intimate interviews with the individuals portrayed.

A zine version of the series was published in 2024 by INDA Gallery in Budapest.

main exhibitions:
2024: #Good morning bro, Gallery Inda, Budapest (curator: Zsolt Kozma)

main publications:
https://loeildelaphotographie.com/fr/lilla-szasz/

 

 

No Bread for Us at Men’s Tables explores the rules and boundaries women and queer people navigate under both dictatorships and modern societies. The project grew out of Captured Liberties (ongoing since 2018), where I examined Salazar-era womanhood through the personal story and family photo archive of Maria Teresa Braz. In No Bread for Us at Men’s Tables, the scope expands to present-day Hungary, combining portraits and interview excerpts from women and LGBTQ+ individuals of diverse backgrounds who shared their experiences with me. In both series, my photographs are juxtaposed with archival images and excerpts from the seminal feminist literary collection New Portuguese Letters (published and banned in 1972).

main exhibitions:

2024: No Bread For Us (with Rita GT) Gallery Liget, Budapest, (curator: Veronika Molnár)
2024: Our Parallel Universes, winter group exhibition at Inda Gallery, Budapest (curator: Zsolt Kozma)

This series is about my maternal grandmother, who was living with Alzheimer’s disease and was cared for by her daughters in her rural home in the final years. The photos open a window onto her everyday, almost profane reality during that time.

main exhibitions:
2022: I hold the table with my hands instead of the broken legs, Trafó Gallery, 2022; (curator: Flóra Gadó)

main publications:
https://www.zeit.de/geld/2025-10/pflege-versicherung-vorsorge-vermoegen-gxe
https://fotohof.at/en/shop/publications/fotohofcalling-magazin-2/

“The point of departure for Lilla Szász’s photographic project Greetings From My New Home is the story of the retornados, the nearly 800,000 Portuguese citizens who were resettled from Portuguese colonies in Africa (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and São Tomé e Príncipe) to Portugal in and around 1975. As a result of the Portuguese colonial war, which began in 1961, the dictatorial Second Republic gradually weakened, and with the military coup of 1974, a rapid process of decolonization began. The accommodation and integration of the retornados, equivalent to nearly a tenth of Portugal’s overall population at the time, was a major challenge for the state and constituted an important chapter in the 20th-century history of the country.

Szász’s photographs capture the personal aspects of this historical event, drawing attention to questions of nostalgia, memory, homelessness, and the plasticity of identity in the lives of those who have left their homes and were able, in varying degrees, to adapt to their new environments. Lilla Szász makes use of a wide array of approaches to portraiture, offering us portraits of people and portraits of places. The points of departure for these private stories were locations, which still exist today, homes of varying quality, from former five-star hotels to military barracks. These sites are the physical repositories of their former dwellers’ memories. The postcard quality of the photographs on display at the exhibition—their size and subject matter, which can be understood as a kind of allusion to the frequent portrayal of hotels on contemporary postcards—conjures a sense of travel, of transience, and offers a reminder of the past. Thus, the images of Greetings From My New Home arrive as messages sent half a century ago.”

Text by Zsuzsanna Szegedy-Maszák

I began to work on this project as part of my Budapest Gallery’s Artist Exchange Program residency in Lisbon. I worked closely together with the sociologist Elsa Peralta.

A photobook grew out of Greetings From My New Home and was published in 2019 an >> it is available to purchase<<

main exhibitions:

2020: Greetings from my new home, Budapest Gallery, Budapest (curator: Zsuzsanna Szegedy-Maszák)
2019: No Place Like Home, La Junqueira Artist Residency, Lisbon (curator: Nuria López de la Oliva)

publications:

2022: Nominated for Rosti Pál Award for the Best Photo Book of the Year (with Greetings From My New Home), Hungarian National Museum

The relationships we engage in throughout our lives, beginning with our families, provide a lot of raw materials for how our characters form. These are some of the most challenging connections we will have and the source of some of our greatest gifts, happiness, and likewise unhappiness and burdens. What and how we perceive is shaped by our lives, and our lives are formed through our relationships: beginning from our parents to our friends, lovers, and others. We cannot avoid them; living without relationships is like living without food.

I am fascinated by relationships.

I take photos of friends, relatives, lovers, and people I know randomly. I wanted to understand what love is. What ties people together. And after nine years of photographing, I realized that there is no one good answer. The answer is that I still don’t know. And I don’t think I ever will.

main exhibitions:

2021: About Love (with Maria do Mar Rego), Imago Gallery, Lisbon, Portugal (Curator: Rui Prata)
2020: About Love, 2B Gallery, Budapest (curator: Judit Gellér)
2016: Dazzle – Gallery INDA, Budapest (curator: Mónika Perenyei)

“I can barely remember my childhood. My parents worked in a metal and steel factory. They had a buffet—peeling potatoes, boiling eggs—our lives revolved around these. Nobody ever visited us. My parents dismantled the ring so that no intruder could ever enter our home. ‘Our home, our castle,’ they would often say. I discovered life carefully. When my parents were out, I would secretly listen to Abba and Boney M. The music thumped, and I was the tribe, and I was the tribal chief. I protected my home and my castle. I think I was happy.”

The Tribal Chief is a monologue photo-diary. It flashes memories from the life of a middle-aged man, starting with the loneliness of childhood, continuing through parental disinheritance following his coming out, and later leading us to public toilets, sex cinemas, and the gloomy world of Budapest’s People’s Park. The main character is fulfilling a mission: he is obsessively chasing happiness. The side characters he meets temporarily during his exploration are mostly unknown. Lilla Szász’s latest project provides a glimpse into a story where the concepts of loneliness and intimacy become relative.

A zine version of the series was published in 2016 by tranzit.hu in Budapest.

main exhibitions:

2019: We will not change our show. The House of Arts, Brno, Czech Republic (curator: Gyula Muskovics and Martin Vaněk)
2016: Our heart is a foreign country. The Studio of Young Artists Association, Budapest (curator: Gyula Muskovics, Andi Soós)

Concept: Lilla Szász and Gyula Muskovics

Photographs: Lilla Szász

Video editing: Barbara Ipsics

Positive is a diary-like photo series offering insight into the personal story of an HIV-positive grandmother. Martha was infected by her husband in the early 2000s and now, as an activist, considers her main mission to be debunking myths and stereotypes about the disease. The images in Positive bring the largely invisible issue of HIV and AIDS in Hungary into the context of everyday life. At the same time, this story raises unusual questions—among them, reflections on the very concept of family.

The video can only be seen upon request. If you are interested, please e-mail me at lillaszasz@yahoo.co.uk

main exhibitions:

2015: Positive. Gólya Community House, Budapest (OFF-Biennale Budapest) (curator: Gyula Muskovics)
2015: Positive – Liget Gallery, Budapest (curator: Gyula Muskovics)

Happy New Year is a story of two women. One of them is Mrs. Brown, who lived, raised two children, had a dog, lost a husband, and died in the apartment where I just moved in. I was about to start a new life after a split. I bought a flat where everything was left: clothes, books, furniture, even diaries. It looked like somebody was still living there. For a year, my new life was interwoven with memories, mines, and Mrs Brown’s. The project is our communication. Images of the objects and words of our diaries are how we got to know each other better. Each talks about her own life, whether with images or words. Mrs Brown gave her permission to occupy her place. I could move in and start her new life.

main exhibitions:

2018: Women in 3 Acts (Paz Errázuriz, Gluklya, Anastasia Khoroshilova, Ditte Lyngkaer Pedersen, Maya Schweizer, Lilla Szász), Gallery INDA, Budapest, (curator: Kati Simon)
2018: Women in 3 Acts (Paz Errázuriz, Gluklya, Ditte Lyngkaer Pedersen, Maya Schweizer, Katarina Šoškić, Lilla Szász), Galerie Fotohof, Salzburg, (curator: Kati Simon)
2014: Feminine Laundry, Gallery 2B, Budapest, Hungary (with Barbara Ipsics)
2014: The Self, Kowasa Gallery, Barcelona (curator: Natasha Christia)

“Life is a longer or shorter period of suffering, sometimes filled with joys and terminating with a certain death. My life: Well, it could have formed differently, but I know that this card was assigned to me, and I drew bad cards. There is a commonly used sentence that if there was a book about my life, readers couldn’t decide whether it would end up as a tragedy or a comedy.

Who am I? Currently, I am only an invalid. Sick. Woman. A woman, who lives together with her mother and an Autistic boy, the son of her younger sister, but I raise him. Who I used to be is much more interesting. I worked in the porn business. I worked in the erotic business. I worked in the night. I worked in the media. Still, I was forgotten within a week.

I am not proud of my past. If I could turn back time, I would never ever become a porn actress. I would be much more perseverant and become an archaeologist.”

Mendi is a former porn actress who lives together with her mother and her sister’s son, Richard, an Autistic boy. Mendi cares about them both. Mendi struggles with obesity and diabetes; she has lived on a disability pension since she left the porn industry. She doesn’t like going outside and mostly plays on the computer or cards with the family. Her mother, Elizabeth, is a pensioner who is always at home too. She likes watching talk shows on TV. They quarrel a lot with Mendi, mostly because of the lack of money. Richard is not Mendi’s son; he was left to her care by Mendi’s sister, who, after finding out that her son was Autistic, left him behind. Mendi loves Richard as her own son. The series try to capture Mendi’s everyday struggles to care about her mother, her nephew, and to bear the unbearable thing that is life.

My book MENDI: The Sensual Heart Attack (2013) is >> available to purchase <<

main exhibitions:

2018: Women in 3 Acts (Paz Errázuriz, Gluklya, Anastasia Khoroshilova, Ditte Lyngkaer Pedersen, Maya Schweizer, Lilla Szász), Gallery INDA, Budapest (curator: Kati Simon)
2018: Women in 3 Acts (Paz Errázuriz, Gluklya, Ditte Lyngkaer Pedersen, Maya Schweizer, Katarina Šoškić, Lilla Szász), Galerie Fotohof, Salzburg (curator: Kati Simon)
2016: Dazzle – Gallery INDA, Budapest (curator: Monika Perenyei)
2013: In Kitchen. In bed. In public – Hungarian House of Photography (curator: Kata Oltai)