Barnabás
Tóth

Budapest
1986

Barnabas Tóth is part of a generation of young photographers who use digital techniques to create faster and more impulsive art in which references to the visual tools of advertising, fashion, or fine art collide. As a matter of fact, he has been an author sensitive to social documentary while at the same time becoming an experienced fashion photographer. Ever since he completed his Master’s Degree in Photography in 2010, he has been working as a freelance photographer and has developed a clearly recognizable, bold, harsh and provocative style of his own. Barnabás Tóth loves contrasts and takes particular care in revealing them. The combination of direct light, harsh colors, surreal sets, exaggerated makeup, and extravagant dressing of his models, as well as a seemingly improvisational framing, makes his work outstandingly intense and audaciously unsettling. His series entitled The Outlaw’s Yard presents a traditional pig killing in the presence of an overacting, overdressed, and made-up fashion model, highlighting the immense contrast between Budapest and the countryside, where opposed sets of values and priorities collide. In Bódvalenke – The Fresco Village, Tóth explores with a humble and socially sensitive focus the eponymous village known for its houses covered in large paintings made by world-known Roma artists. Piercing the outer, bright and colorful shell of a place that has become a tourist attraction, Tóth sheds a sincere light on its predominantly Roma residents and their real, everyday life.