Sylvia Plachy
[Photographer, b. 1943, Budapest, Hungary, lives in New York.]
Every photo is almost a fiction or a dream. If it’s really good, it’s another form of life.
What makes you push the shutter has to do with seeking a kind of perfection, a harmony in the world. You are instinctively aware it’s there, but you’ve got to be completely alert and quick and so deeply awake that it moves you.
Stop and go: always on some journey. My bounty is a photograph or two.
As a relentless gatherer of moments, I find that my favorite images, although grounded in the present, are like spirits shaped by memories. They whisper of fairy tales, poetry, and other lives, as each gesture connects with another and raises yet another from the dead. Shadows flicker on film to an inner melody as I navigate, camera at hand and at the speed of light, through unimaginable worlds—desperately trying to make sense of the joy and suffering before it all disappears.
The work of the artist is not so much what you say or what you know, it’s recognizing what you know. That’s what life is about. That’s what photography is about. You see something, or you hear someone say something, and you say “That is a truth.” You know, deep in you. That’s when you start shooting.