Fates, faces, temperaments: people who use the most subtle means to fight the harshest fates. They ward off storms with a straw.

They avail themselves of all the possibilities of existence, space and time, with profound wisdom and exhilaration, with lightness.

The diversity of cultural experiences and practices also leads to diversity in visuality. I examine the forms that have emerged in the course of historical development in different regions of the world, through the encounter, mixture and exchange of cultures.

Wherever a society is modernizing, portraiture also undergoes modernization. That is because modernization, modernity, modern society are global phenomena, and are not exclusive to Europe. Examining the similarities of cultures, their differences and distances cannot be limited to interpreting the modernities of non-Western societies in the light of Western modernity. I consider it my task to trace and study the changes in visual language based on the findings of the social and cultural sciences. I seek to capture modern society globally, regionally and locally.

However sudden, dramatic or radical, the course of modernization cannot immediately change the entirety of the cultural, artistic and religious traditions of portraiture. And although these phenomena, forms of knowledge and concepts are themselves constantly changing, they are adapting to a set of globally prevailing ideas and practices. These forms of knowledge represent the historical continuity to which the ideas and practices of modernity must adapt. Modernization overwrites or rewrites the differences between societies, the traditions: put differently, the old differences give rise to new differences.

For an example, take the medieval, tripartite concept of society, in which it comprises of three orders: the oratores, the bellatores, and the laboratores—those who pray, those who fight, and those who work. The priesthood prayed for the lay people, and the lay people defended the priesthood. In this case, it is quite clear that the moral order is more than just a set of norms. An exchange of ideas, reaching a common understanding whenever possible. With all the pomp, ritual and imagery of hierarchic complementarity.

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‘Do something good and do it well—that is my artistic credo,’ says Zsuzsanna Kemenesi, photographer and communication scientist, who taught visual communication as a guest lecturer at the Communication and Media Studies Programme of the University of Pécs between 2004 and 2017, and was also an associate professor at the Faculty of Photography at the University of Kaposvár. Kemenesi was a Pécsi József Photography Fellow between 1999 and 2002, and from 1996, she was a scholarship student at the Photography Programme of the Faculty of Media at the Art Institute of Indonesia, Yogyakarta, Java for one year. She studied in London in 1994, and in 2000 she was an artist-in-residence in Salzburg. In 2005, she was elected into the board of the Association of Hungarian Photographers. She pursued her PhD studies in Budapest between 2000 and 2008 at the Doctoral Programme in Communication.

In 1997, at her first solo exhibition, she presented the Infranesia series in Jakarta’s Gallery TC, and went on to show the same set in Hungary the next year, at the Mai Manó House. Kemenesi’s creative process has been inspired by Gábor Kerekes, Péter Herendi and Zsolt Péter Barta, and she exhibits her works in Asia, the US and Europe.

Her solo albums and books include Magánbeszéd (Private Talk, Városháza Kiadó 2000); Sweet as Cherry, Fine like Wine (Magyar Fotóművészek Szövetsége 2008), with text by Christopher Rauschenberg; and Fotókalligráfiáktól a titkosírásokig (From Photo Calligraphy to Cryptography, GlobeEdit 2019).