His early pho­tographs are usu­ally la­belled "doc­u­men­tarist", but this word does not ex­actly fit what he was doing. When pho­tograph­ing Bu­dapest tram stops, and later elec­tric­ity transmis­sion wires, he was re­ally pro­duc­ing his own kind of por­traits. In both of these se­ries he picked out from a world nor­mally looked on as grey and every­day the in­di­vid­ual, the de­tails and per­sonalities im­por­tant and in­ter­est­ing in their own right. In 1983, at the Young Artists' Fes­ti­val, he set up a tem­po­rary pho­to­graphic stu­dio in the Bu­dapest's Small Sta­dium, to where he in­vited fes­ti­val vis­i­tors to have their por­traits taken. Nearly two hun­dred pic­tures were pro­duced in an iden­ti­cal way: the vis­i­tors en­tered the com­pletely dark room, cu­ri­ous as to what was going to hap­pen, and were sur­prised by a sud­den pho­to­graphic flash. The fol­low­ing year, he con­tin­ued with the se­ries, "Long Live the First of May!". In front of a white can­vas stretched be­tween the trees of City Park, he pho­tographed peo­ple from the May­day crowd with a Po­laroid cam­era, pre­sented them with the re­sult, and then pho­tographed them again with the pic­ture they had by then signed, and thus ac­cepted. It was not Andy Warhol's idea of "every­body will be fa­mous for 15 min­utes" that these pic­tures ex­press so much as the basic view of Diana Arbus, a view which em­braces an inter­est in ex­tremes, but whose real, fun­da­men­tal char­ac­ter­is­tic is iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with the world of the "hu­mil­i­ated and de­pressed", or if you like the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with the human con­di­tion. These works tes­tify to the same basic phi­los­o­phy by which Richard Ave­don pho­tographed his age­ing self or his fa­ther in var­i­ous stages of dying. It is the es­sen­tial basic phi­los­o­phy for achiev­ing a gen­uine, durable por­trait, or in Gy­orgy Toth's case, a body por­trait.

In the wake of artists such as Hel­mut New­ton, Robert Map­plethorpe, Ar­turo Toscanini, and of so many mil­lion nude pic­tures, could it nonethe­less be pos­si­ble, could it be worth­while, to pho­to­graph nudes? And could it be pos­si­ble, could it be worth­while, to at­tempt it in Hun­gary, iso­lated from con­tem­po­rary move­ments, hyp­o­crit­i­cal in its morals, and with pub­lic taste so re­stricted? In­deed, this was per­haps the very sit­u­a­tion where it was pos­si­ble and worth­while. Just as the pic­tures of Ave­don, Map­plethorpe, Toscanini proved that it was pos­si­ble to pho­to­graph the most naked truth with­out a trace of eroti­cism, that com­plete im­per­son­al­ity arises where things are re­duced to the most in­ti­mate de­tails, Toth's work con­vinces the viewer of the exact op­po­site: that ab­solute im­per­son­al­ity and de­tach­ment can also give a spe­cial ten­sion to a pic­ture or se­ries of pic­tures. Through the right model and a par­tic­u­lar set of move­ments, the pho­tog­ra­pher can con­vey mes­sages, human con­di­tions and con­flicts which can­not be put over by other means. The body and its move­ments carry every­thing that the face and the gaze do. These pic­tures make clear to their view­ers Toth's con­cept of pho­tog­ra­phy ex­pressed in his words: "the beauty of the fe­male form, the in­scrutabil­ity of the soul of woman, and their var­i­ous rep­re­sen­ta­tions are the means by which I can re­ally say what is within me."

Gallery Erdész & De­sign and Vic­tor L. Men­shikov