Gábor Máté

He has been involved in photography since he was a teenager. His Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts thesis, entitled ‘Fur Coat’, which he completed in 1991, defined his path for photography. Initially, he started photographing for various clients, such as advertising and cultural posters, publications and books. He has worked for international agencies and has also created a project called Open Air 8×10, which was exhibited at the International Center of Photography School, in New York.

Later on, he was invited to join the teaching team at MOME, and soon afterwards he was accepted to the MOME Doctoral School, where he worked on his own creative area, human attachment. The result in his doctor’s thesis was “Philémon’s Dream – the ideal of eternal marriage”, where he dissected the hardships of living together, illuminated by photographs depicting married couples.

In 2015, he was elected Head of the Photography Department at MOME, where he took over as curator, organizer and subject director. Meanwhile, he created the series entitled “Divorce. The resolution reached with difficulty“, in which he unveiled the raw emotions of divorce through his staged photographs of divorced parents. Later on, he worked on photographing the divorced parents’ children from that series.

In 2018, he was awarded the Rudolf Balogh Prize for his work.