Viola
Fátyol

Debrecen
1983

Viola Fátyol has an exceptional sense for blending documentary with a personal approach, while her photographs manage to evoke metaphors and compositions from art history. She usually draws her inspirations from deeply personal stories, from the intimate social networks that occur naturally in a community, and continuously re-collages those experiences. Fátyol graduated with a Master’s degree in Photography from Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest in 2011 and is today a lecturer of the Photography Department of MOME. Her series Orando et Laborando (2011) draws an emotional landscape of her own teenage years spent at a protestant high school in the Eastern Hungarian city of Debrecen. The artist’s memories impart a lyrical tone to the photographs, allowing the viewer to get a glimpse of everyday life and the touchingly simple, sincere moments of a traditional community.
In her project entitled If you have a heart, what you did to me hurts you too, which was awarded the Robert Capa Grand Prize in 2016, Viola Fátyol immerses herself into the close-knit community of a traditional choir composed of elderly women, with whom she starts to sing regularly, after a heartbreak. The project presents the therapeutic process of her emotional healing, her initiatory journey through mourning, sorrow, and joy with the comfort and help of Hungarian folk songs, as well as the path shown by the elderly women’s touching experiences, stories, and struggles as wives, mothers and widows.