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. In this post you can read the conversation between Lujza Hevesi-Szabó (HU) and Matteo Buonomo (IT).

Lujza Hevesi-Szabó studied photography at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, then worked as a photojournalist and is currently a photographer for Telex.hu. Her works mainly deal with social issues and family dynamics. Hungary, especially the Hungarian countryside and the current situation of the people living there, plays a prominent role in her subjects. She uses irony to make his work attention-grabbing and consumable. She mixes classic documentary photography with elements of subjective visual storytelling.

Matteo Buonomo approached photography as a self-taught artist after earning a diploma in Graphic Design and Art Direction from NABA Milan in 2014. In 2015, after spending one year in Tbilisi (Georgia) working on a documentary about Abkhazian refugees, he returned to Italy and joined the photography collective CESURA, where he remained for two years. While at CESURA, he shifted away from a photojournalistic approach, developing a long-term, research-driven photographic practice with a strong focus on photobooks. After leaving the collective in 2017, he began working as a freelance photographer. In 2020, driven by the need to find a place to call home, he moved from Milan to a small village of 50 inhabitants in the Val di Noto. There, he began working on All These Goodbyes, a body of work that serves as both self-reflection and the story of an escape. In the spring of 2021, he spent three months in Denmark collaborating with photographer Jacob Aue Sobol (MAGNUM) on the production of his book James House (2022).

The conversation between Lujza and Matteo:

Lujza: I just looked at the pics you sent me for the third time, and there’s something about them, I don’t know, it’s eerie and fragile. It’s as if these people and places were stuck somewhere outside of space and time, and if something disturbed them, they would disappear. Can you tell me about it?
I really like these.

Matteo: Ciao Luiza, well, thank you for your words. The way you described the photographs really resonates with me. I probably couldn’t have said it better. In some sort of way, this feeling of being stuck somewhere out of space and time is the feeling I have while I take photographs, and it is what I do. I just place myself somewhere where I know I can feel something deeper, somewhere where I know it hurts, and then I expose myself to this, the people, the landscape, the longing, the loneliness… everything… I like when photographs don’t really say anything but rather they are more evocative of something more universal that we feel somewhere deep inside us but we can’t really point exactly where or what actually it is. It’s something that we feel in our gut, on our skin, behind our neck, under our feet, or on the tip of our nose. It’s something that touches the whole of who we are, and for a moment, we feel less alone. It’s something that break our hearts.

And what I do as a photographer is try to break your heart.

I don’t know if I answered your question or if you wanted to know something more specific about the photographs…

Lujza: Yes, you said that in Prague, and it’s really the most on-the-point phrase I have ever heard about photography.

I can relate to this very deeply and feel what you are talking about. There are some kind of gentleness and softness in your photos, but at the same time, they are somehow serious. How much of yourself do you put into your photos?

No, not serious, more like heavy and cutting deep.

Matteo: I try to put all of myself in the photos, and I try to put more than I’m comfortable with, but that’s the only way I think to challenge myself and the people who will look at the photograph. People respond to honesty and sincerity in art… As I said, there’s no real concept or narrative in my work beyond the fact that it is me taking photos, and it is a way to talk about me, but at the same time it is a way to talk about you as well, about what it means to be a human being… evoking our fear, frustrations, dreams, subtle joys, etc…

I saw your photographs, and I think we can agree that our photographic language might be considered quite opposite to one another. Your photographs feel more direct and confrontational, sometimes even “merciless.” They also seem to bring a certain amount of rage, but despite this, I never had the feeling that with your work you exploit or mock people. I saw in your photographs an honesty and sincerity that totally took me into your vision. So I ask you, if I try to break your heart with my photos, what are you trying to do with yours?

These are some of my favorite, and it seems they are all taken at night. What do you find in the night that the light of the day doesn’t have?

Lujza: Well, yes, and let’s face it, there’s no other way to do this whole thing except by putting yourself into it. That’s what makes it honest and real and brings out anything in anyone.

If I had as much money as the number of times I’ve been asked this question and couldn’t answer it, I’d be very rich by now. If you want to break people’s hearts, I want to make them laugh and shake them up, so at the end of the day, we both want the same thing: to convey and evoke emotions. I feel that there is a lot of frustration in me and around me, especially in the countryside where I grew up. There is a lot of unspoken tension, politeness, and pressure to be a certain way and show our good side. I could never stand it, I didn’t understand it, and with my pictures, I let out this tension that builds up under the surface and help others let it out a little too. I love it when people laugh at them. At the same time, I see that they laugh because the pictures accurately reflect them, and in their confusion, they don’t know what to do except laugh at first.

If the two of us were merged into one person, I would really like to see what that photographer would do.

There is something very calming about the night, everything is much more focused, your attention, you can select what you see and what you don’t. I really like working like this, getting in the car at sunset and driving around the county where I grew up until dawn, going into villages. At night, it’s always a greater and more special joy to find something exciting and spectacular. During the day, everything seems flat to me. At night, everything dissolves.

Matteo: It’s very poetic, this image of you driving through the night when the lights fade and everything dissolves, and starting to actually see things….

Lujza: Yes, I’m a very poetic girl; I just cover it well for most of the people with mercilessness.

Don’t you do things like that?

Matteo: All the time. In this last project, I spent more than a month driving around and sleeping in the car, just to be as much exposed as I could…

Lujza: I totally get that, and you are not tired or hungry, just having this rush and feel that THIS IS IT feeling which is rare, and you just go, as if nothing really matters.

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-SzabóLujza (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.  ↩︎