From October 16 to 19, Art Market Budapest showcased an exhibition featuring the works of the 2025 FUTURES talents. Before the exhibition, Capa Center initiated five online dialogs in between ten FUTURES talents, creating five brief one-to-one conversations, that is, elevator chats.¹ In our upcoming posts, we present the five elevator chats, which are provide a quick insight into the current issues explored, the artistic practices pursued, and the diverse techniques applied by these talented emerging photographers. First, you can read the conversation between Anna Gajewszky (HU) and Emilia Martin (PL).

Anna Gajewszky is a photographer based in Budapest. She has recently graduated from the photography masterclass of Moholy-Nagy University of Arts and Design. Her work is mainly characterized by its intimate exploration of personal issues, with a focus on the intricate quality of human relationships. She examines connections people form with each other, their families, their past, their own bodies, animals, and within a larger aspect the land. 

Anna’s letter to Emilia: 

Hi Emilia,

This is a kind of letter for you about my artistic practice, inspirations and ideas.

My story starts as most of the stories start, my father had a camera that he taught me how to use it when I was about 9 years old.

I have first wanted to be a film director and spent my teens watching all of the big classics, which I believe very much led me to have a strong visual approach to the world. Some images from these movies I have watched are still with me today, they appear behind my closed eyes and they are one of my strongest inspiration sources.

The meaning of the color and the meaning of the environment. They are an important part of my practice, I am quite intentional with the use of them.

I later started to be more interested towards the medium of performative arts, writing and photography. Some of the names that were leading me towards my path were Patti Smith, Marina Abramovich, Sally Mann, Pina Bausch, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Frida Kahlo, Ana Mendieta, Annie Ernaux and Joan Didion.

Now as I read the names back I realize they are all women. It is not an intentional decision rather the way I am interested in art. I feel these women have shaped my life and myself with their work and I keep coming back to them over the years.

In my work I am interested in many things but one of my main focus is womanhood and family. I have done a series called In the search for Venus on femininity and body image. It is a very important piece for me as this was my first work where I have begun an artistic style that I truly feel is mine. I look back to this work and feel like it was a starting point for my own language.

My work has always been about what is happening with me or what is my main interest at the time. When I was a child I had this recurring dream about our house burning down. In 2021 I suddenly found myself in the reality of this dream as I was trying to take my grandfather out of the burning family home. The experience in itself was traumatic, as one can imagine and I will not go into detail about it but I am showing some of my work which came out of the experience.

With experiences such deep and horrifying you need some time to be able to reflect on them. For me it was automatic that I take photos and do something while I process it but I haven’t actually managed to make a proper series of this work. And I am also not sure if there ever has to be a finished work. I believe that sometimes an artistic practice can be used for ‘selfish’ reasons like making a situation manageable.

One of my first memories as a child is sitting in the back of the yellow Dacia, screaming because my mother is leaving. We are going somewhere, maybe after her, maybe somewhere else, I don’t know, but my grandmother is still running back to the garden because she forgot to water something or maybe she forgot to turn off the gas, I can’t remember. I am three years old, my sister has meningitis, my mother rushes her to the hospital. I stay with my grandparents in Kisiratos, a Hungarian village in Romania. At this time I am alone a lot in the village. We pick peas, the house still has its original entrance, built in the 1800s, I sit on its stairs in the mornings. Several generations live in the house together. In the evenings I wait for the cows, at dawn I hear the crack of the hooped whip, the gully going to the pasture. I eat meat soup, heart and liver are my favourites, for a long time they kept it a secret from me that the chickens we ate on Sundays are the chickens from our garden. Later I watch them cut their necks, they twitch for a long time before they bleed out. We go to church, the priest always compliments us on how nice we are, he comes and consecrates the house on New Year’s Day. We have Jesus crucified, going from house to house, I am always waiting for him to come to us. We pick the plums, 3 lei an hour, then we go to the market with Tata. I want a big doll, but my father and mother won’t let us have a plastic doll, my grandmother buys it in secret. She’s the size of me, Idrag her up the stairs, her head  bangs, the neighbor’s wife tells me I am going to kill that baby. In the fall, we make corn dolls at the time of harvest, and its clothes are made from husk. We have a house in Parajd, near the forest. I don’t dare to go out alone, I’m afraid the bear will come. In the evenings we sing folk songs by the fire, and during the day we search for the castle of the half-fairy, half-witch, Mrs.Rapsón. In the barn we sleep in the hay, in the morning my hair is matted and straw-covered. In the village called Kápolnás we bake dandelion bread in the oven, wrapped in cabbage leaves. The women knead the bread, put it in the oven and beat off the crust, because it’s good if it’s a bit charred. I’m learning to make stuffed cabbage, cook plum jam, bake scones. I listen to family stories, one after the other, there is no interconnection, I often don’t know exactly who they are talking about, but I understand years later. They are often terrifying, ringing in my ears to this day, forming a kind of image of life, family, and womanhood. “They pushed her out of her belly, her head was purple, that’s why she was like that, she was handicapped” or “Mother died in my arms, I held her like this when she stopped breathing, she was a very good woman, she died very young” and “When she came home, she told her youngest son to cut off that peanut branch and beat all five of her children with it, she was a tough woman, she raised them on her own” or “Her mother, your great-grandmother, died when electricity came in. She was found dead on the ground with the cord of the iron in her hand, trying to plug it into the socket” or “When it was Aunt Maris’ funeral, Feri brother said he wasn’t feeling well, and then he slammed the pálinka glass on the table at the funeral pyre, fell over on his side and died.” and “She was 13 years old when she had her first period. Her mother said nothing, but slapped her in the face and said, “You’re a woman now, my daughter.”

This piece of writing is part of the series called: Mother Don’t You Cry

I think the work I have done on the women in my family is in a way a work that defines me. It tells about where I am from and what are the basics of my identity. The images are based on my memories, my dreams and mostly on the tales that I have heard growing up about the life of women in the family.

I am not sure if anything else has to be said as there is a quite long text about the work on the previous page. I would only add maybe that I think this work gave me a lot of confidence in being able to do what I truly believe in doing.

There are some other things that can be said about me. For example I do all of my photographs with a Mamiya RZ. It allows me to act more of a director which is something I have been interested in since childhood. The use of self portraits is in a way letting the audience step into my life but they are also an act, I step into characters and I am not the same persona as I am in my work. I don’t believe photography can be used as therapy, I believe it can help with many things but I like to think of it as what it is. It is a form of art which makes you feel and think about things but it won’t necessarily heal you.

I live outside of the city, in a big garden. I love to go for walks, I love cooking and baking. If I would need to choose a second job I would either be a chef or a gynecologist. I am very angry about the way women’s health is still not studied enough and I get frustrated about how many of my friends have issues with their menstrual cycles. I am also very interested in farming and I grow my own vegetables. I am working now on a new work which is food related.

What else can be said about me?

I have learnt many things from the artists that I have previously mentioned, but which I would say is the most important to me, is that they have shown a way of being a woman artist. An artist that does what they believe they should be doing. It is power in my art and power in myself, the belief that it is worth doing is what these women have taught me.

Thank you Emilia for reading and looking at my work, I am very excited and curious to see yours.

Love,
Anna

Emilia Martin is a Polish artist and photographer based in The Hague, Netherlands, where in 2022 she graduated from Photography & Society Masters at the Royal Academy of the Art. Working with photography, writing, and sound, she explores how the stories we tell shape the realities we inhabit. She investigates mythologies and tales, and how they fluctuate and shift throughout histories. Through her work, she aims to complicate the binary understandings of fiction and truth and their established aesthetics. 

Emilia’s letter to Anna: 

Dearest Anna,

I am writing to you from the bus in the Southern Spain, I am travelling now to the festival where I will have a solo exhibition of my new work Hail Mary, Bobbin Lace, Serpent’s Thread. The bus is crowded and too warm, but looking at the sea through the window brings a certain nostalgia that I find quite inspiring for this (let’s call it) letter.

You wrote that your love story (that’s not the word you used but forgive me the fantasy) with a camera begins as most do. I found it beautiful but nothing like my experience.

On his death bed my grandfather, while I was pointing my old film camera (actually, the same one that you use in your work) at his hand, looked me straight in the eye and said „I used to take photographs too”. This statement confused me for many reasons. Firstly, I was an active photographer for many years at that point and he never shared this information with me. Secondly, I could not recall a single photograph that he took. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, where he came from, a tiny village in the Eastern Poland surrounded by the vast forest, people did not have cameras. If their lives were ever to be documented, it was through the exoticising lens of the urban, upper class photographers seeking refuge in the countryside which they visited for a day and left. In these photographs people such as my ancestors would wear their best clothes, often borrowed, posing in front of staged backdrops, covering much less pleasing realities, looking directly into the lens.

He passed away shortly after this conversation, and I never got to discover the mystery of my own photographic history, adding yet another layer to my many ancestral secrets. What I did learn is, that my grandfather indeed had a camera, he had an entire darkroom in his basement. I never came across any of his photographs. 

I have once read somewhere that in Polish countrysides people were suspicious of their photographs getting into the unknown hands, often resulting in the practices of burning the images, or burring them in soil. I don’t know whether that is the case, but this story gives me a lot of peace – I like to imagine the photographs taken by my grandfather becoming one with my ancestral soils, feeding the forest that knows of my own family history more than I ever will.

I suppose what I am trying to tell is, I believe that my relationship with this strange, mysterious medium of image making (or rather: storytelling?) in many ways preceeds my life and conscious understanding.

If I am to be completely honest, I get frustrated with photography a lot. I often think that I don’t actually like it that much. What I do like is the process of unraveling mysteries, of structures and stories revealing themselves. I believe that the medium of photography is particularly good with both masking and revealing, often doing so against its own premise. When I look at something long and carefully enough, I may get a glimpse of something deeper and more profound than I could understand with my conscious minds.

This act of gazing, understood as in giving platform for things to unravel in the most unexpected ways, not from the position of the observer, but the position of merging, is extremely powerful. It is not limited to pointing a camera at something, instead, it demands a level of obsession – when I photograph a rock I need to, for a brief moment, become a rock.

Is this an anthropocentric fantasy?
Maybe, but I like to think it is an exercise of being in the world radically and empathically.

In your letter you wrote about women, and how they acted, without you first realising, as the wise ancestresses to your work and inspiration. It makes me think of a story that is very important to me in this moment, while working on my new body of work Hail Mary, Bobbin Lace, Serpent’s Thread.

The word godsip is the old Germanic origin of what we now know as gossip. It used to mean a female relative unrelated by blood, which essentially means a particularly close fem friend. Godsips were tending each other while giving birth, a particularly intimate and sacred situation, that was exclusive for closest people. Silvia Federici, the feminist scholar and theoretician has made an extensive research into the history of the word and its meaning and by doing so she revealed the transformation that the word has gone through. From something that used to represent the essence of female solidarity into something that we understand now – gossip, as the act of petty female activity of talking shit behind one’s back. Federici points out that the history of this word is a history of demonisation of female solidarity under (or rather: by) the patriarchal oppression.

This idea of reclaiming gossip as a tool for horizontal sharing of information and knowledge following the intersectional feminist principles, but also as a tool for solidarity, generosity and dare I say it – liberation, serves as a premise behind my most recent work (and an approach that sips greatly into my life).

Hail Mary, Bobbin Lace, Serpent’s Thread deals with female textile works, inspired by the story of my grandmother who was a countryside textile worker.

Textile works, like gossips, are a language that formulate in a very democratic and subversive manner. The patterns and knowledges travel between generations of women or through friendships – godsips – and each time as they pass from one pair of hands to another, they transform, readapt, morph. The language of domestic textiles has in many ways a certain uniform vocabulary, but is also very intimate and private. It offers a space of individual expression, but always grounded in a collective, it is democratic. Perhaps this is the very reason why Renaissance definition of “high art” has rejected textile works – because they challenged the very premise of (male) artistic genius.

In my work I am (re?)creating a world that I have lost with my grandmother and her textiles, which, perceived as of no value or importance were either given away or lost. With them I have not only (again) lost my ancestral legacy or an archive of my family history, but a tactile document of time that my grandmother, minute by minute, wove into one with her fingers. (isn’t that what storytellers do?) 

I think photography is particularly good with speculative – maybe because we still tend to believe in it so naively? Whether I point my camera at something that has already existed in the world, or something I have staged is irrelevant to me. What I care about is creating universes (or shall I say metaverses) that can be layered, seductive and complicated enough for me to want to believe in them enough to know: aha okay, this too is a reality.

With love,
Emilia

FUTURES – European Photography Platform started in 2017. This cooperation, which connects 20 photography centers across 20 European countries, set as one of its main goals to scout remarkable new talents and introduce them into the world of international photography, and into the art market inparticular. Each institution participating in FUTURES selects five emerging artists per yearand then creates a number of situations for them–exhibitions, roundtable discussions, tutoring, portfolio reviews, workshops, and virtual events–where they can establish professionalrelationships with people from different areas of expertise within photography, and with eachother. 

FUTURES – European Photography Platform is co-funded by the Creative Europe program of the European Commission.

Capa Center’s FUTURES talents in 2025: Anna Gajewszky, Lujza Hevesi-Szabó, Sára Kölcsey-Gyurkó, Olivér Lantos, Hunor Tóth

The The Elevator Chats 3.0 exhibition was organised by the Capa Center and curated by Emese Mucsi. 

The exhibiting artists were: Gajewszky Anna (HU) & Emilia Martin (PL), Hevesi-Szabó Lujza (HU) & Matteo Buonomo (IT), Kölcsey-Gyurkó Sára (HU) & Zoe Hamill (IE), Lantos Olivér (HU) & Alessio Pellicoro (IT), Tóth Hunor (HU/RO) & Igor Schiller (RS/NL)

1. The elevator pitch or elevator chat is an impromptu self-introduction technique performed in monologic or dialogic form, allowing the speaker to transfer substantial information to their interlocutor about themselves or the project they are working on. ↩︎