The respective documentary photos of Wanda Martin (b. 1991) and Gábor Martin (b. 1953) are separated by more than forty years and some two thousand kilometres. Yet the social phenomenon they sensitively portray is almost the same, if the subcultural milieu in question is fairly closely defined.

Gábor Martin photographed partying young people in the 1970s, particularly in Békéscsaba, while his daughter, also a photographer by vocation, does the same in today’s London. According to Wanda, ‘you can barely tell the pictures apart, which we think is the perfect illustration of how rebellion is encoded in the DNA of every culture, even if without reason.’ In their double series, images of a London subculture correspond to shots of nightlife and youth culture behind the Iron Curtain—and the series is timeless in the sense that rather than wishing to depict the period they lived in, the photographers sought to capture the ageless rebellion and group dynamics of young generations.

Father and daughter were about the same age when they made their respective series, though the possibilities at their disposal were very unlike. While studying for a teacher’s degree in geography, art and art history, Gábor Martin also attended the photojournalist course of the Bálint György Academy of Journalism—which at the time was the highest level at which photography was taught in Hungary. He went on to work as a photographer, cinematographer and advertising photographer. Well before the political transition, in 1981 he founded a business, Reklámfotó Stúdió (Advertising Photography Studio), which served state-owned and private companies in what was a budding market economy. In an interview he gave four years ago, the Békés County Príma Prize-winning photographer admitted that ‘I was sad to learn that my daughter also wanted to become a photographer,’ although Wanda had already very different opportunities in the field of photography. Last year the artist presented a series of self-reflective collages in Mai Manó House’s PaperLab Gallery, exploring the challenges of love and the question of attraction, and the themes are again featured in her parallel exhibition with her father.

Since graduating from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design and the London College of Fashion, the artist, who lives and works mostly in London, though calls Békéscsaba her home, has gained international recognition primarily as a fashion photographer. Music has been key to her career, with her most famous series comprising documentary and commissioned fashion shots of musicians. A Canon Europe Ambassador, she has worked for Dior, Louis Vuitton and Burberry, among other companies. Jane ‘Austen, the Brontë sisters and of course the Sex Pistols,’ have been formative influences, she says, but she considers her photographs of Jesse Hughes, Sundara Karma, the Fat White Family and their like less important than the timeless images that can be related to the places and visual representation of 1970s nightlife. ‘These people and these parties echo the subcultures that our parents created in revolt against political regimes, to voice their discontent,’ she concludes, while this attitude is already about something fundamentally different from the rebellion against socialist political oppression.

‍

‍