The curator leaned forward: “What’s your signature?” I laid out seven photobooks and dummies, from nocturnal confession to subtropical blues. She wanted one glance, one brand. I offered a stack of mismatched passports: one name, many countries. As photography historian David Campany argues, the obsession with visual signature often reveals more about market anxieties than artistic integrity.
In the 20th century, style became synonymous with identity. Edward Weston’s pure forms and Cartier‑Bresson’s “decisive moment” became instantly recognisable brands. The f/64 group insisted on minute details of print finishing and mounting standards in the name of consistency, and curators praised artists who deepened a singular look rather than repeated reinvention. By mid-century, influenced heavily by European Modernist clarity and precision, iconic photobooks like The Americans (1958) sealed the deal, and consistency became an artistic virtue and market currency.
By the 1980s, semiotics and critical theory questioned the notion of visual signature as a definitive artistic monogram. Artists insisted that “voice” lives in concept, not form, and embraced multiple visual languages. Photography blurred into installation, text, and concern about practice, rather than look, became standard.
Today, photographers produce distinct, internally coherent projects whose visual signatures might radically differ. However, commercial galleries and educators remain cautious, urging emerging artists to maintain a unifying look that helps collectors recognise an artist at a glance.
Two decades in the film industry have taught me that every new film demands a different palette and mise‑en‑scène. Visual effects left me fluent in the grammar of cinema, but hungry for personal expression and artistic autonomy. I began carrying a Leica, seeking a medium of total creative control. That shift wasn’t about finding another “brand,” it was about freedom.
I carried that habit of reinvention into photography. Rather than repeat a signature look, each project opens with a question that insists on its visual syntax. I work much like a filmmaker moving from thriller to road movie to period drama: the film stock changes, aspect ratio shifts, and even the cadence of cuts evolves.
Ralph Gibson’s The Somnambulist hit me at first sight, showing what photography could be. Observing how he has reinvented his work in each volume of the Black Trilogy was a lesson. Each volume opened a new chapter in an ongoing dialogue with perception and mystery. That freedom lit a fire in me.
When I finally left film in 2022, I carried with me two lessons: one was the craft, and the other was the focus on dramaturgy. Contact sheets replaced storyboards, photobooks became my projection rooms. In each “paper film,” I assume the roles of auteur, cinematographer and producer, all at once.
Authorship demands intent: I can no longer shoot randomly. Photography is project‑based, and meaning accumulates in sequences. The work is born on the editing table, but the camera supplies the vocabulary. Starting with a “point of departure,” an intuition, I roam, discover, gather, and edit in a narrowing cycle from accident to consciousness. The project requirements soon emerge, dictating medium, format, palette, processing, aspect ratio, and camera choice. Because the ideas differ, so must the syntax.
A body of work is a self-contained universe. Within its borders, I’m obsessive about coherence, maintaining the internal logic of a little world. Crows Nest reached for panoramic black‑and‑white landscapes, sequenced to the horizon line as an allegory of calm and chaos. In BLACKOUT, I turned to blurry, grainy shadows to reconstruct a night I could not remember due to alcohol‑induced memory loss, using chronological sequencing as a detective tool. In Undercurrents, with the frozen river as a metaphor for resilience in the uncertain times of the global pandemic, I chose an almost calligraphic black‑and‑white again with a wider format to reflect the stretch of the river’s shorelines. Citramarine was best served by brightness and saturated colours to match its psychological content. Incubus, which grew from a darker corner of my mind, called for surreal distortions, deep blacks, and tenebrism to echo its unease, arranged in diptychs to shift the meaning-making towards the audience.
None of these could be rendered credibly in the same visual dialect, yet they all circle the same preoccupations: impermanence, the seduction of darkness, and the uneasy divergence between documentary fact and interior dream. Style changes, my only rule is that form must serve concept.
The underlying spine reveals itself beneath these shifts. My pictures search for the surreal hiding within the empirical, the “straight‑surrealism” I first recognised in Chang Chao‑Tang’s and later Brassaï’s work. Their lesson was that reality is already strange enough; one must simply angle the mirror to catch it. I take comfort in that lineage. Also, I recurrently favour vertical frames because they feel like keyholes, dropping the eye into a dream state, where reality ends and speculation begins. A keen observer could find these links that help to navigate a photographer’s multi-volume work.
Photobooks are my theatre, where I project my films. When someone picks up BLACKOUT or The Floating World, they enter a bespoke narrative, complete in itself. No prior knowledge of my oeuvre is required. Each book stands alone, a finished thought. A book lets me orchestrate tempo, silence and revelation exactly as a director does in the edit.
These “paper films” are linked by a fascination with the possibilities of creating transient memories with image sequences, and a conviction that photographs can operate as gestures that urge the viewer into active co‑authorship. I want the reader to do a little work, to notice how two images spark a third in the mind. The books are laboratories of ambiguity: by presenting fragments, they invite the audience to collaborate, turn the pages and weave their visual narratives. This exchange is my real signature.
I am aware that the art market loves a recognisable stamp. This chameleon practice risks confusing collectors who expect the stamp of a recognisable “brand.”
Branding is useful to galleries, but it strangles inquiry. I’m here to explore, to satisfy my curiosity and make observations that matter. I’m confident that today’s audiences can appreciate depth and range as much as unity.
Reinvention also keeps the work honest, forces me to relearn seeing, and resists the comfort of habit. I give each project the chance to be original and not a sequel. Working this way is harder. I cannot lean on a formula, and I regularly discard images that would please online but derail the book. As a reward for risk-taking, each project teaches me fresh grammar and keeps the practice elastic. If I locked myself into one style, I’d wake up one day and feel the spark gone.
Viewed as an island chain, my work is surrounded by endless curiosity: Crows Nest’s sea horizons, BLACKOUT’s nocturnal maze, Undercurrents’ frozen river, and The Floating World’s transience. I invite the audience to trace the path of this cartographer, forever altering his tools to chart the next island.
Andras Ikladi
Xiamen, China
2025.04.19