Adam Magyar



is a photographer and video artist.

Life and work

Adam Magyar was born in Hungary in 1972. He began taking pictures in his late twenties, when he started wandering Asian cities capturing their street life in images of Indian street vendors, wandering holy men, and students in an exclusive Himalayan school. Obsessed with finding innovative new uses for digital technology, Magyar's work quickly evolved from conventional documentary photography to the radically experimental and surreal.
Among Magyar's numerous inventions is a way to insert motion into still images. In his attempt to comprehend the interface of time's infinite flow in the world's modern metropolises, he has developed techniques to capture, on a single visual plane, disjointed, fragmented images of parts of an individual or group on a crowded street. A theme that recurs throughout much of his body of work is based on interlinking yet distinct ideas and techniques that aid us to see the inherent beauty found in the everyday. His unique vision and technical abilities has inevitably led him to modify and even develop his own hardware and software. In his Urban Flow and Stainless works he uses the slit-scan photography technique, known also for use in photo finish cameras, as well as in other, often industrial, techniques. He uses a high-speed camera in his video series entitled Stainless, in which he captures at extremely high speeds densely populated urban areas. Magyar's work fuses the objective, even mathematical reality with the purely subjective, creating a unique fusion of technology and art.

Solo exhibitions

His work is included in several public collections including:
Contact Sheet 170: Adam Magyar, Light Work

Public speaking engagements

Magyar spoke at several image festivals and conferences including FINI, International Image festival, UAEH, Pachuca, Mexico ',
KAUST, Winter Enrichment Program, Saudi Arabia', TEDSalon Berlin, Bits of Knowledge, Adam Magyar: Photographing the Unfolding of Daily Life, Admiralspalast, Berlin, Germany ',
TEDxGateway, Adam Magyar, Mumbai, India ',
PopTech: Pop Casts, Adam Magyar: Photos of Time, Camden, ME

Reviews and articles

Afterimage, June 2015,
Collector Daily, March 2015,
New York Times, March 2015,
Brooklyn Rail, March 2015,
Artsy, February 2015,
The Independent, February 2014,
Matter, January 2013,
PDN, March, 2012,
Digital Camera Magazine, February, 2012,
Flash Art, January, 2012,
Muerto Magazine, February, 2011,
Katalog, 22.2, 2010,
PQ Magazine, Number 99, 2010,
Unit Magazine, July, 2010,
Discover Magazine, April, 2010,
Zoom Magazine, December, 2009,
British Journal Of Photography, September, 2009,
am Post, September, 2009,
HK Magazine, September 4., 2009,
Fotomuveszet, February, 2008

Scholarships and awards

2009 International Photography Award, 1st place in Fine Art - Collage subcategory for Squares, 1st place in Special - Aerial subcategory for Squares,
2006-2007 Jozsef Pecsi Scholarship,
2004 Grand Prize, Hungarian Press Photo