Mari Mahr (b. 1941) is a Hungarian-British photographer born in Chile, married to a New Zealander and trained in London. Moving around the globe and language is found across her work where she produces black and white composite images to convey feelings of the past and memories.
One of Mahr’s images from her A Few Days In Geneva [1] series came to my attention during Assignment 2 research. It was referred to in the ‘Memories and Archive’ chapter of Art and Photography [2] which described her work as “allegorical collages”. She uses a combination of family photographs and objects to evoke a sense of “dreams and dim memories”.
Most of her work relates to the past and memories and all of it is in black and white. This makes sense for her work. But if your childhood was late sixties and seventies then colour would be more appropriate.
I found it interesting to note, whilst watching a talk she gave at the AA School of Architecture [3], that Victor Burgin was teaching at the Polytechnic of Central London (PCL) at the time she was studying there in 1973. Burgin’s work [4] included use of composite style images involving projections, textual and graphical captions.
She has strict control over her compositions and starts with a blank page and uses layers to create simple, uncluttered images where she combines at least two of her own images. One image will be used as the background and the foreground is dominated by images of ‘out of scale’ objects.
In the video she covers aspects of context that can change interpretations of her work. She has one image of burning candles on a photo album in memory of lost family members. The tradition of burning candles in people’s memory is not known in Britain but would be commonly understood in her home nation of Hungary. When she showed it in Argentina it was viewed favourably as a political piece highlighting the plight of the disappeared. She confirms that it wasn’t created as a political piece but she can see why they had interpreted that way.
In A Few Days In Geneva [5] she was inspired by a trip across the channel where the cobbled streets and rooftops of Geneva reminded her of her childhood in Budapest. In this series she created two sets (in two rows) one row representing her life walking around her home city.
The second row shows torn pieces of sheet music floating in front of open windows. This represents the music she remembers emanating from a neighbouring window. The music was Chopin’s Polonaise and it is these fragments of sheet music she uses in the images.
The final result produces a nostalgic piece capturing the concept of childhood memories and the flow of memories floating around her mind.
References:
- Mahr. M, A Few Days In Geneva, Travelling Light 1988
- Campany. D, Art and Photography, Phaidon 2007
- Mari Mahr – Daughter of an Architect – You Tube [accessed 09/11/2017]
- The Separateness of Things – Victor-Burgin [ accessed 09/11/17]
- A Few Days in Geneva – Mari Mahr’s website [accessed 09/11/2017]
Martyn Rainbird 