daughters

2005

A girl stabs her own father to death. Another shoots her stepfather. A third is a thief. They’ve all lost something, or never had it in the first place: parents who loved them enough, or an environment that supported them in times of trouble. “Why do such people like my parents need a child?” asks Sabina with a trembling voice. “They can fuck but they can’t give love or tenderness.” Sabina has spent three years in a detention home for adolescent girls. She was only four months old when her parents first put her in an orphanage, and she spent her life shuttled from one orphanage to another.

Her father once worked as a mechanic, and her mother also had a job. Then they both started drinking, and the family fell apart. In 2004, Sabina and her three brothers and sisters were taken away by the government and put into a home. At that time, she was the only breadwinner in the family, and she called her job “Shopping Malling,” which meant stealing from shopping malls. Sabina was 10 years old when she began to steal. Then the drugs came, starting with sniffing glue and ending up on heroin. She was eventually busted for armed robbery; she and her two friends held a girl at knifepoint and ordered her to give over her wallet. The girl only had 35 bucks and a ragged cell phone.

Sabina thinks that her crime was nonsense. But she also says that she had no other choice. “My mother and father left me. Where else could I have turned?” When I took these photos, she was clean and living a normal life in the detention home. After the detention home, she was going to go to a care home with her brothers and sisters.

I have always been interested in situations in which one can experience the extremities of life. The people I photograph and their fates are not often spoken about. They live their lives, they try to survive, and the only time they come into our consciousness is when they commit a crime. Nobody cares why they did what they did. Nobody thinks there could be reasons for their behavior. I committed myself to these children to show what the beauty of life means for them, what their dreams and hopes are. And the answer is so simple. They wish to be what they are: children.

‘Daughters’ was photographed in a juvenile detention home. When I looked around their rooms, I could see how much they are attracted to Hungarian and international pop stars and celebrities. When I asked them why, they said it’s because these people are beautiful, rich, and successful. I became curious. I wished to know how these women find beauty and happiness under circumstances in which they are closed away from life and live together waiting for freedom — even if freedom means going back to crime for many of them. So I asked them to think about what the word “beautiful” means to them. They dressed up in their most beautiful clothes and took me to their favourite places. They behaved in front of my lens in the way they thought they were beautiful. Part of my concept was to let them control me. Thus, they organised my pictures, which showed their dreams about life and beauty.

Based on the series, a book was published by FOTOHOF in 2012. >> it is available to purchase <<

main exhibitions:

2024: #Good morning bro, Gallery Inda, Budapest (curator: Zsolt Kozma)
2013: In Kitchen. In bed. In public, Hungarian House of Photography (curator: Kata Oltai)
2009: Busted, Powerhouse Arena, New York (curator: Sara Rosen)
2005: Necc, a világ tyúkszemmel, KOGART House (curators: Krisztina Erdei, Judit Katalin Elek)