Einstein's camera: how one photographer depicts time
- Transfer
Adam Magyar is a computer geek who quit university, a self-taught photographer, Rub Goldberg, a high-tech traveler around the world, and a concept artist with growing international recognition. But no one could have imagined that he could also be a terrorist until that morning, until he went down to Union Square subway station in New York.
At that time, Magyar was immersed in a long-term project at the intersection of technology and art called Stainless(“Impeccable”), creating high-resolution images from passing trains and passengers, using sophisticated software written by him and a modified industrial camera. The scanning technique that he developed - combining thousands of frames wide in a pixel into one image - allows him to catch passengers by surprise while they fly noiselessly through the dark subway tunnels, capturing them in ghostly images filled with details that no one can capture ordinary camera.
Magyar installed his usual set of devices — a camera, a scanner, voltmeters, blue and black cables, a battery, a tripod, a laptop — and waited until the train rolled out onto the platform. What he did not expect was the vigilance of the New Yorkers who survived the September 11th, some of whom complained to the police about a man with long hair carrying something that looked like hastily assembled tracking equipment. It was not long before a traffic police officer approached him.
- What are you doing? - he asked.
“Scanning the trains,” Magyar answered.
A police officer took Magyar to a room in the bowels of Union Square Station, where he called a couple of plainclothes officers to interrogate him. They examined his equipment, carefully looked at his digital files. “Tell us, who are you working for?” A question followed from them.
As soon as Magyar convinced them that he was not studying the metro for illegal purposes, that he was an artist ( his website , on which examples of his works helped ), the police agreed to a fine of $ 25 for violating the rule banning the use of a tripod at the station , and let him go home.
This was not the first time Adam Magyar had to explain his work to intrigued observers. Born in 1972 in Hungary, Magyar began taking photographs when he was in his late twenties, wandering the streets of Asian cities and taking photographs of Indian street vendors, Hindu monks, and Himalayan students. His work quickly evolved from generally accepted documentary photography to surreal, radically experimental images that reflect his passion for finding new and unusual ways to use digital technology. A self-taught engineer and programmer who built his first computer while still a teenager, Magyar takes his pictures using some of the world's most advanced photographic devices, refined using programs that he writes himself. Additional code
In the growing amount of photographic and video art created over the last ten years, Magyar bends the usual notions of time and distance, stretching milliseconds for minutes, capturing moments in resolution that the naked eye could never have perceived. His art originates in such diverse sources as Albert Einstein, Zen Buddhism, and even the 1960s television series The Twilight Zone. The images themselves - smooth silver subway cars, serious passengers lost in their own inner worlds - are beautiful and elegant, but also cause a feeling of alarm. “The moments that I shoot are meaningless, they have no history, and if it is possible to grasp the essence, the quintessence of being, then everything is probably captured,” says Magyar in one of many mysterious comments about his work, which reflect both her hypnotic craving and her elusiveness. There is a feeling that you are entering a different dimension, occupying a place between stillness and motion in a world of distorted time, where the laws of physics do not work.
Magyar's work is a fruitful interaction of technology and art, two disciplines - one objective and mathematical, and the other completely subjective - which were not always perceived as harmonious or generally compatible. However, they intertwined, and technological breakthroughs often made possible new forms of art. Five thousand years ago, Egyptian craftsmen heated desert sand, limestone, potash and copper carbonate in furnaces to produce a synthetic pigment known as “Egyptian Blue,” which contributed to the highly realistic stylized portraits of the second and third dynasties.
By the fifteenth century, paint mixed with clear oils, linseed oil and walnut oil began to replace the opaque, egg-yolk-based tempera, filling the art with new color brightness and naturalism that paved the way for Renaissance masters like Jan van Eyck, Tintoretto and Caravaggio. Nineteenth-century experiments with light-sensitive materials capable of capturing and stabilizing an image, starting with Louis Daguerre's silver-plated copper sheets coated with iodine, led to the invention of photography. In the 1950s, the rapid successes in creating emulsions and photosensitivity of the film allowed filmmakers to take their craft to the street and shoot with minimal light, thereby highlighting a new wave of naturalistic films by Jean-Luc Godard and other innovators.
Digital photography, first developed in the 1970s, gave rise to two types of image input devices: conventional digital cameras and scanners. The former shoot an entire object in one exposure. The latter, in contrast, capture the image sequentially. The sensor moves along an object, such as a printed document, and photographs it line by line, and then collects the cumulative image. Scanners, image editing programs and high-speed production video cameras have allowed conceptual artists to break out of the scope of traditional photography and create ever more abstract and surrealistic images.
Doris mitchLiving in northern California, she scans plants, marine life and other natural objects in her old Mac G4, then edits in Photoshop to create stunningly vivid compositions that cannot be obtained with the most light-sensitive cameras. Penelope Umbrico creates huge collages from images found on the network. Her project “541,795 suns (from the sunsets) on Flickr”, created in 2006, reflects her fascination with the Internet and the way he crushed other realities. A photographer from Latvia, Misha Gordin, creates frightening black and white composite images, such as his famous series Crowd("Crowd"), which cause a feeling of oppression by the totalitarian system. Gordin once wrote: “In conceptual photography ... an idea or vision is transformed by the camera into an image connected with reality only by my imagination. The initial process is like writing poetry. Only then does it become more technical. ” Magyar, a fan of Gordin’s work, also creates black and white photographs and videos imbued with a similar burden, although his people are not connected by the political system, but by the boundaries of their own perception.
The first time I met Magyar was in his neat two-room apartment in Friedrichshain, an ennobled area of former East Berlin. He has long, dark hair, a fluid beard and mustache, a pensive look of dark eyes. It looks like a portrait of a Slavic holy Renaissance or an aged rock musician living in one of the last buildings squatted by Berlin.
Magyar has been living in Berlin since January 2008, but has held only a few exhibitions there and does not communicate with local artists. “The galleries here are a little punk, and my work is the work of engineering,” he told me, brewing an espresso in the kitchen while his girlfriend Zazi Porcalmi, a Hungarian translator who he knows from high school, served Christmas cookies in the living room. Having lived in Berlin for six years, Magyar barely speaks German, which reflects how he is immersed in other disciplines - “I spent time here learning two programming languages, I didn’t have time for anything else,” he explains - this is the attitude uninvolved observer that pervades his work. How he grabs moments from the lives of metro passengers in his Stainless Seriesso I was able to catch Magyar during a brief pause in his life, full of movement: he always moves forward.
Magyar was born and raised in the Hungarian city of Debrecen, a regional center with 200 thousand inhabitants, immediately west of the Romanian border. His mother was a dentist, his father was an architect and interior designer who created bars and restaurants for a state-owned company in the communist era. The senior Magyar earned money as an artist, making fancy lamps and other household items made of copper in the workshop near his house. “I grew up in my father’s workshop,” Magyar recalls. - I learned to work with tools, gained a common understanding of materials. And I learned to combine different things. " Magyar's parents sent him to an elementary school with in-depth study of music, and he sang in the most prestigious children's choir in Hungary, performing in Finland and Greece, when most trips to the west were forbidden. He enrolled in a technology high school, but found that there was too much theory in the program, and rebelled against discipline. “I was the only one in the class who did not need to wear a uniform. I have never been able to control easily, ”he says. Magyar dropped out of university, learned to program, assembled simple computers and lived on the money that he got as a freelance graphic designer, and besides that, he spent two years running his own business, printing corporate logos on pencils and lighters. He told me: "It was terrible, but it was money." he collected simple computers and lived on the money that he received for his work as a graphic designer-freelancer, and in addition, he spent two years running his own business, printing corporate logos on pencils and lighters. He told me: "It was terrible, but it was money." he collected simple computers and lived on the money that he received for his work as a graphic designer-freelancer, and in addition, he spent two years running his own business, printing corporate logos on pencils and lighters. He told me: "It was terrible, but it was money."
By this time, the Berlin Wall had fallen, the Eastern Bloc had collapsed, and Magyar could quench the growing thirst for wanderings. “I always wanted to travel as I remember. I was about four when I dreamed of running away and wandering around the world, ”he recalls. “My father once told me that there used to be people whose profession was to travel, and I took his words on faith. I liked the idea of living with one suitcase of things, moving from place to place. She seems to be firmly stuck in my head. When I received my first salary, I just left. I think I'm kind of a regular traveler. ” Having traveled with a backpack in Morocco, at 27 he first came to India. “It was the hardest place I've ever been to,” he says. - Colors, smells - all this is difficult to digest. She became for me something like Mecca, and I began to return there every year. "
The life of a regular traveler honed Magyar's skills as an observer and reinforced the feeling that he was an outsider. On the one hand, he was in constant motion. On the other hand, he was able to remain motionless for a long time, simply observing the course of life. Once he spent half a year studying the movement of the river in Varanasi, the ancient religious capital of India, on the banks of the Ganges. During that trip, he asked Zazi to bring him a book for beginner photographers, which he won as a prize back in elementary school. “I was almost thirty,” he said. - And I began to study the aperture values, light and began to print in a dark room. I really liked it. ” A year later, he documented daily life at a private school in Darjeeling, a hill station in the Himalayas in northeast India, and his series of black and white photographs won first place at the annual Hungarian reportage photography contest. “He never worked too fast,” Zazi recalls. “If he thought a person or place was exciting, he spent hours with him.”
But Magyar quickly realized that he was bored with simple documentary photography. He mounted the camera inside the cinema in Varanasi, and took pictures of the audience in almost complete darkness with a shutter speed of one minute. He shot footage of passengers sitting in the backseat of a taxi in Calcutta, and people locked in the doors of the medical emergency room and elevator in Shanghai. Hannah Frieser, former head of Light Work, a cooperative-based artists ’organizer who organized an ambitious exhibition of Magyar Kontinuumat once in three museums of the USA in 2013 - Light Work in Syracuse, the Houston Center for Photography and the Griffin Museum of Photography in Boston - says that “a series with elevators is central in understanding his work. It reflects the idea of taking a camera, making it motionless, and taking pictures of people again and again. He does not look at people with an appreciative look. He avoids asking a lot of questions. Instead, only the experience of observation and presence, and the definition of life through this stream. " This work also reflected Magyar's growing interest in the limitations of human sensory perception compared to what was possible using new and old technologies, and became a prototype of his efforts to push the boundaries of what we can see and experience. “I wanted to put people in a cage, in a way. I thought about how little choice we have, when we choose our path, he told me. “We can only see from a narrow angle, no matter what we do.” Our knowledge is really limited and very few. ”
Magyar began experimenting with scanning in 2003. “I wanted to go beyond the scope of ordinary photography,” he said. - I remember that I slept a little. I spent the whole night thinking how to do it. ” In his early experiment, Magyar assembled his own primitive scanner using an East German slide projector that cast a narrow beam of light. Then he built a platform of Lego blocks, which allowed this beam to "scan" the object, slowly sliding from top to bottom. An ordinary SLR camera saved all scanned lines at a time, collecting one image from them during an exposure in one minute. Thus, the scanner cut a minute of time into thin sections, and the camera collected sections back, creating one image from all these moments. Magyar scanned himself, experimenting with different movements, which created distorted final images. “When I turned, the resulting image showed my body wrapped in a tailspin,” he says. - It was an interesting technological experiment, but nothing more. I abandoned him for several years. "
However, he was still fascinated by the idea of shooting different parts of one person or several people at different times, creating a still image from “small pieces,” as Magyar himself says. This coincided with his growing interest in what he calls the “ever-changing nature of the present,” a constant stream of life that did not yield to attempts at simple visual display.
In 2006, when he spent several months in Shanghai, he had an insight. “I had a feeling that I would, so to speak, scan the flow of people. I started looking for places of the right type, where people would walk at the same speed. ” Magyar first studied escalators in Shanghai malls. Then his gaze fell on the city streets, in particular large intersections or bus stops with a constant flow of people. As soon as a concept appeared in his head, he began to develop a technology in order to implement it. “It was an ongoing study,” he says. “I spent a few weeks before I figured out all the details.”
The answer, as Magyar understood, lay in a modified version of the slit camera, which is used to shoot photo finishes on racetracks and Olympic competitions, recording the sequence of time in one image. Such cameras were rare and cost many thousands of dollars, so Magyar decided to make it himself. He connected a lens from a medium format camera to another sensor and wrote a program for a new device. Total cost: 50 dollars. He turned the traditional scanning method inside out when the sensor moves along a stationary object. This time, the sensor will remain in place while the scanned objects will move, photographed by a strip of one pixel wide (this is the basic principle of the camera for photo finish). Magyar mounted the device on a tripod in a crowded area of Shanghai and scanned pedestrians walking in front of the sensor. Then, on a computer, he combined over 100,000 consecutive lines into high-resolution photographs.
The result was Urban Flow , a series of prints 30 cm high and 2.5 meters long that captured the parade of humanity marching through time. Those on the right walked past the sensor about two minutes earlier than those on the far left. “Every little piece is a present, and all these pieces of the present come together to tell you a story,” Magyar explains. “By the time we see the story, it looks like our memory: it has already passed.”
The eerie distortions of fixed objects and objects in motion remind viewers that they are looking at a graphic image of time, not space. Fast-moving buses were squeezed into cars like Smart. The buses slowed down like passenger planes. Slowly walking people appeared with trousers, their feet stretched out like skis or became narrow, like Oscar Pistorius's composite prostheses. And due to the curious feature of the scanning technology, everyone moved in the same direction. “The horizontal axis does not reflect space, it means not left and right, but sooner and later,” he says. “If two people cross the pixel at the same time, it will look as if they are walking together.”
Urban flowIt is perceived simultaneously comical and with a share of melancholy, as a distorting time and consciousness vision of human destiny and mortality. The choice of black and white display was made after a lot of deliberation. “I experimented with color, but people looked like color confetti, which was not my goal,” says Magyar. - This is not a carnival, for me it is something sad. We are all moving towards the same destination, and it is like death. ”
Lars Torkul, a design engineer living in Shanghai, met Magyar in China and came to his Shanghai apartment to see the process of working on a new project. “This place shocked me with its view,” Torkul recalls. “It was necessary to squeeze past water bottles and other things into the room and inside it to get to the table.” After Torkul saw a hastily assembled prototype for shooting, Magyar showed the first frames of the Urban Flow series on his computer screen. “I was delighted with the beauty and clarity of the images,” says Torkul. - I said: “Adam, this is incredible, are you going to show it?” But he didn’t even think about it ... So many technologies were used that he hadn’t worked with before. He said: “This is far from finished work.” I replied: “What are you talking about? They may be ready very soon! ”
Torkul introduced Magyar to his friend, French artist Thomas Charveria, who had just opened the Island6 gallery in a converted warehouse in the Shanghai Artists Quarter. Sharveria was also fascinated by the slit photographs of Magyar, and he proposed organizing an exhibition. Magyar sold almost all of the ten or so small works that he had printed for the exhibition - for a reasonable price from $ 700 to $ 1,400 - and received several more orders. Magyar was struck by the fact that his work generally had commercial value: “I returned to Hungary, but I knew that on this basis I needed to start doing something.”
His next major project was Stainless , filmed inside metro stations in large cities such as Paris, Tokyo and New York. It was a qualitative leap forward. He was able to buy a high-quality industrial camera and a slit scanning device, designed for high-resolution shooting of printed circuit boards, bottles and other objects moving quickly along assembly lines to detect micro-cracks and other defects that cannot be detected with other types of cameras. The slit camera he obtained uses one row of photosensitive sensors to constantly scan objects moving at high speed, removing almost all the distortions.
Stainlessconsciously makes you recall theoretical physics, in particular, sends the viewer to the mental experiments of Albert Einstein. The fixed Magyar camera, aimed at a moving train, echoes Einstein's hypothesis that “remote simultaneity” - the idea that two events separated in space occur at the same time - is not absolute, but depends on the observer's coordinate system. In a famous thought experiment, Einstein imagined two observers - one standing inside a moving carriage of a train, and the second standing on a platform when this train passes by - who perceive the same flash of light at the moment when their paths intersect. The passenger of the train sees that the light hits the front and back of the train at the same time, the stationary observer sees that the light reaches these points at different times. In the same way, Magyar distorts time and shows the subjectivity of human perception: his slit camera transforms a moving spot into a frozen image of impossible clarity and stillness, into a reality that neither passengers arriving at the station nor those waiting for the train on the platform perceive. People on his trains ride together, but at the same time, separately, lost in their own thoughts, often mesmerized by their mobile devices.
“You start to pay attention to how these people interact with their devices, and how little they interact with each other,” says Hannah Freezer, a former executive at Light Work. However, these ghostly images can also be seen as a triumph of human society, which Magyar began to appreciate more when traveling around the world. Strap-on metro passengers in Paris, Shanghai, Hong Kong, New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, Rome and Berlin all find striking similarities in appearance, facial expression and attitude towards others, which overcomes cultural and geographical differences. In her notes for art exhibitions, Magyar Frieser drew a clear line between street photography of recognized artists such as Diane Arbus, Gary Vinogrand and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and how Magyar takes his photographs. “The life he chronographs consists of ordinary people, not the most beautiful, eccentric and poor, who usually attract the attention of photographers,” she wrote. - They looked for differences, while Magyar finds similarities. They moved through the city, while Magyar remained motionless and waited for people to pass by his cell ... He visits more and more cities in different countries and on different continents until the features common to all mankind begin to appear. ”
Photos from the Stainless seriesalso showed the most impressive example of Magyar's indefatigable perfectionism. He desperately wanted to shoot on the Tokyo subway - “an incomparable metro system, an incomparable urban environment” - but a subtle blinking of the light led to overexposed and underexposed frames that looked like vertical lines in his images. Magyar's decision: for a week he traveled on the subway with an exposure meter, measuring the level of lighting at all 290 stations. “I found five stations where the light was high-frequency, so I could start working there,” he recalls. “But the light inside the train was still bad, so I spent three months creating a program that allowed me to get rid of these lines.” Magyar also faced another problem when he was forbidden to work with a tripod in the New York subway system. He had to take it off hand which added even more distortion to the images. He had to spend a few more weeks writing code that fixed them. Lars Torkul, a German structural engineer, compares him to a Zen master. “In Zen Buddhism, you can train for five years before shooting for the first time with a bow. It accurately describes what he does, ”Torkul told me. “There is no time for him.” He lives and performs his work clearly and in all details, just as in his images. ” “There is no time for him.” He lives and performs his work clearly and in all details, just as in his images. " “There is no time for him.” He lives and performs his work clearly and in all details, just as in his images. "
Shortly after the completion of Stainless , Magyar began to think about moving to moving images. After several months of research, he convinced the German manufacturer Optronis to lend him one of the high-performance industrial camcorders worth $ 16 thousand. Such cameras are used for shooting crash tests, studying robotic manipulators and even for analyzing the movement of the hind hooves of horses participating in show jumping competitions. Using high light sensitivity and sophisticated TimeBench analysis software, the Optronis camera captures high-resolution images at an incredible speed: up to 100 thousand frames per second - for comparison, a conventional movie camera shoots at 24 frames per second.
Magyar turned the concept of Stainlessupside down: now, instead of standing on the platform, filming passengers passing by, Magyar was sitting inside a moving car, recording videos of motionless people on the platform, while the train and the camera were entering the station. Einstein’s ghost once again permeates these images, and he again distorted the time: Magyar shot video at a speed 56 times faster than normal, turning the 12-second blurry views of the station into 12-minute films, tormenting with their slowness. Its passengers stand, together, but separately, with an exquisite, three-dimensional grace of statues - only the curvature of the lips or the finger extended towards the iPhone suggests that these people were captured in an ultra slow motion, stuck in a stretching moment. Magyar extracts feelings from a dismissively small moment of time. “I want to capture what happens in milliseconds, the origin of which you don’t even realize, ”he told me. “I am stretching the moment — the present, now,” because, as humans, we only live in the past and the future. But the only existence we have is now, and we don’t even take it into account. ”
Breathtaking Clarity Video Series Stainless- It is also the result of the most complex code that he has ever written. In his experiments with industrial cameras, Magyar found that the image quality was ideal for measuring speed, distance and volume, but was not quite suitable for the artist's needs. He wrote sophisticated programs to improve the quality of images shot in low light and poor contrast. Another problem was digital noise — vertical, horizontal, lines, and other random distortions, a typical problem with high-sensitivity digital sensors. He spent almost two years intermittently devising programs to reduce noise, solving one problem and immediately running into another. “Engineers don't have to work on it, but I have to. I can not sleep. I have been working on this for months and do not stop.
A few days after our first meeting, I agree to meet with Magyar at Alexanderplatz, one of Berlin's most crowded metro stations, to showcase his Stainless project. I arrive at rush hour and wait ten minutes on one side of a platform filled with people until he appears. His long hair is scattered in a black park, which is complemented by black boots, black jeans and a black backpack. In a backpack, Magyar wears his modified Optronis camcorder and laptop. Four cables, blue and black, stick out of his backpack. He says the volumetric equipment makes him feel like “the hero of the Ghostbusters.” After his collision with the police at Union Square, Magyar modified the equipment so that it could be carried in a backpack, but in my opinion, the new layout raises even more suspicions. Six elevated lines and three underground lines converge at Alexanderplatz, creating a constant flow of people all morning. “I'm looking for a place where there are no gaps in the crowd, and the more people, the better,” he tells me.
Together with Magyar we hop on a train and go one station to Rosa Luxemburg Square, then cross the platform and take the next train to Alexanderplatz. In a filled wagon Magyar draws the apparatus out of a backpack. The camera body made of gray aluminum, connected to the viewfinder, pen and cables that connect the device to his laptop, looks like a prototype twisted in a garage. When he points the lens at the window, red and green lights flash. “They always ask me:“ Did you do this yourself? ”” He tells me, while others are watching with curiosity. A few minutes later we roar into the station, and Magyar begins recording. In twelve seconds, everything is ready.
We stand and wait four minutes until eight gigabytes of new data are copied to his laptop (during such trips, he usually takes two external hard drives with him, on which three terabytes of data can be written). Magyar studies a procession of beautifully lit faces that he extracted from a 12-second blur, and claims to be satisfied. To get the results that suit him, he shoots hundreds of hours of video. One of his favorite clips in the series, shot in 2011 at Alexanderplatz, fortunately caught two little girls running skipping along the platform in the background. Their graceful movements contrast with the stillness of people in the foreground - an unexpected reminder that the image in front of the viewer is not a photograph, but a stretched moment - Magyar calls it “inter-time”. “These girls became a real gift for me,”
Of the many disciplines Magyar has to deal with in his work, the most difficult was marketing. He entered the world of art by accident, and in the early stages of his career was puzzled by how this business works. “It’s not very pleasant to live with the naivety of a 20-year-old when you are 35,” he admitted a couple of days later when we drove through Berlin on a rainy evening in his workshop in the luxurious Savigny-Platz district. Magyar was about to send several prints of Urban Flow to an art exhibition in Miami Beach. “I started doing this at the worst time - 2008, 2009 - when the art market collapsed,” he says. Five years have passed from that moment, and Magyar now receives significantly more money for his work - up to $ 14 thousand for a Stainless print.- but he still finds it unpleasant to engage in business relations and self-promotion, which are necessary for development. “He has no commercial instincts,” says Lars Torkul.
However, Magyar is studying. He became a more confident and persuasive speaker, organically weaving together the conceptual and technological aspects of his work. This year, for the first time, he was able to live only on income from art. His work has been exhibited in galleries from Harvard University to Budapest. In February, his work will be shown as part of an exhibition of three urban life artists at the prestigious Julie Sol Gallery in Manhattan. The exhibition will include a Stainless video and several prints from his Squares series.(“Squares”), created between 2006 and 2009: photographs of hundreds of people taken from pedestrian bridges, then connected together in Photoshop into imaginary city squares, aerial view. “I have nothing to complain about,” says Magyar.
Magyar plans a future installation in the gallery, where he will project several videos on large screens surrounding the audience and accompany the video with ominous sound effects - a slowed-out screech of brakes, the background sound of a metro station. “Sometimes people tell me that when they watch a video, they think about death. It's a bit like getting out of the body, ”he says. Andrew Zolly is Executive Director of Pop Tech, an organization that brings together innovators in art and science. After he was faced with the work of Magyar, he invited the artistmake a presentation at the Pop Tech conference in Camden, Maine. He has a different view of these works. “His work says we're alive,” Zolly insists, “that the world is an even more vibrant place than we imagine.” In any case, life or death, Magyar enjoys any reaction: “What could be better for an artist than that? This is an incredible feeling when you can do what others think about. And when that happens, I'm really happy. ”
Posted by Joshua Hammer . Editors - Mark Horowitz , Tim Heffernan . Verification of facts - Hilary Elkins. Photo - Andreas Chudowski . Translation - Yuri Karabatov.
At that time, Magyar was immersed in a long-term project at the intersection of technology and art called Stainless(“Impeccable”), creating high-resolution images from passing trains and passengers, using sophisticated software written by him and a modified industrial camera. The scanning technique that he developed - combining thousands of frames wide in a pixel into one image - allows him to catch passengers by surprise while they fly noiselessly through the dark subway tunnels, capturing them in ghostly images filled with details that no one can capture ordinary camera.
Magyar installed his usual set of devices — a camera, a scanner, voltmeters, blue and black cables, a battery, a tripod, a laptop — and waited until the train rolled out onto the platform. What he did not expect was the vigilance of the New Yorkers who survived the September 11th, some of whom complained to the police about a man with long hair carrying something that looked like hastily assembled tracking equipment. It was not long before a traffic police officer approached him.
- What are you doing? - he asked.
“Scanning the trains,” Magyar answered.
A police officer took Magyar to a room in the bowels of Union Square Station, where he called a couple of plainclothes officers to interrogate him. They examined his equipment, carefully looked at his digital files. “Tell us, who are you working for?” A question followed from them.
As soon as Magyar convinced them that he was not studying the metro for illegal purposes, that he was an artist ( his website , on which examples of his works helped ), the police agreed to a fine of $ 25 for violating the rule banning the use of a tripod at the station , and let him go home.
From the Stainless series , New York, 2010. Printed works are more than 2.5 meters long.
This was not the first time Adam Magyar had to explain his work to intrigued observers. Born in 1972 in Hungary, Magyar began taking photographs when he was in his late twenties, wandering the streets of Asian cities and taking photographs of Indian street vendors, Hindu monks, and Himalayan students. His work quickly evolved from generally accepted documentary photography to surreal, radically experimental images that reflect his passion for finding new and unusual ways to use digital technology. A self-taught engineer and programmer who built his first computer while still a teenager, Magyar takes his pictures using some of the world's most advanced photographic devices, refined using programs that he writes himself. Additional code
In the growing amount of photographic and video art created over the last ten years, Magyar bends the usual notions of time and distance, stretching milliseconds for minutes, capturing moments in resolution that the naked eye could never have perceived. His art originates in such diverse sources as Albert Einstein, Zen Buddhism, and even the 1960s television series The Twilight Zone. The images themselves - smooth silver subway cars, serious passengers lost in their own inner worlds - are beautiful and elegant, but also cause a feeling of alarm. “The moments that I shoot are meaningless, they have no history, and if it is possible to grasp the essence, the quintessence of being, then everything is probably captured,” says Magyar in one of many mysterious comments about his work, which reflect both her hypnotic craving and her elusiveness. There is a feeling that you are entering a different dimension, occupying a place between stillness and motion in a world of distorted time, where the laws of physics do not work.
“I learned to work with tools, gained a common understanding of materials. And I learned to combine different things. "
Magyar's work is a fruitful interaction of technology and art, two disciplines - one objective and mathematical, and the other completely subjective - which were not always perceived as harmonious or generally compatible. However, they intertwined, and technological breakthroughs often made possible new forms of art. Five thousand years ago, Egyptian craftsmen heated desert sand, limestone, potash and copper carbonate in furnaces to produce a synthetic pigment known as “Egyptian Blue,” which contributed to the highly realistic stylized portraits of the second and third dynasties.
By the fifteenth century, paint mixed with clear oils, linseed oil and walnut oil began to replace the opaque, egg-yolk-based tempera, filling the art with new color brightness and naturalism that paved the way for Renaissance masters like Jan van Eyck, Tintoretto and Caravaggio. Nineteenth-century experiments with light-sensitive materials capable of capturing and stabilizing an image, starting with Louis Daguerre's silver-plated copper sheets coated with iodine, led to the invention of photography. In the 1950s, the rapid successes in creating emulsions and photosensitivity of the film allowed filmmakers to take their craft to the street and shoot with minimal light, thereby highlighting a new wave of naturalistic films by Jean-Luc Godard and other innovators.
Digital photography, first developed in the 1970s, gave rise to two types of image input devices: conventional digital cameras and scanners. The former shoot an entire object in one exposure. The latter, in contrast, capture the image sequentially. The sensor moves along an object, such as a printed document, and photographs it line by line, and then collects the cumulative image. Scanners, image editing programs and high-speed production video cameras have allowed conceptual artists to break out of the scope of traditional photography and create ever more abstract and surrealistic images.
Doris mitchLiving in northern California, she scans plants, marine life and other natural objects in her old Mac G4, then edits in Photoshop to create stunningly vivid compositions that cannot be obtained with the most light-sensitive cameras. Penelope Umbrico creates huge collages from images found on the network. Her project “541,795 suns (from the sunsets) on Flickr”, created in 2006, reflects her fascination with the Internet and the way he crushed other realities. A photographer from Latvia, Misha Gordin, creates frightening black and white composite images, such as his famous series Crowd("Crowd"), which cause a feeling of oppression by the totalitarian system. Gordin once wrote: “In conceptual photography ... an idea or vision is transformed by the camera into an image connected with reality only by my imagination. The initial process is like writing poetry. Only then does it become more technical. ” Magyar, a fan of Gordin’s work, also creates black and white photographs and videos imbued with a similar burden, although his people are not connected by the political system, but by the boundaries of their own perception.
The first time I met Magyar was in his neat two-room apartment in Friedrichshain, an ennobled area of former East Berlin. He has long, dark hair, a fluid beard and mustache, a pensive look of dark eyes. It looks like a portrait of a Slavic holy Renaissance or an aged rock musician living in one of the last buildings squatted by Berlin.
Magyar has been living in Berlin since January 2008, but has held only a few exhibitions there and does not communicate with local artists. “The galleries here are a little punk, and my work is the work of engineering,” he told me, brewing an espresso in the kitchen while his girlfriend Zazi Porcalmi, a Hungarian translator who he knows from high school, served Christmas cookies in the living room. Having lived in Berlin for six years, Magyar barely speaks German, which reflects how he is immersed in other disciplines - “I spent time here learning two programming languages, I didn’t have time for anything else,” he explains - this is the attitude uninvolved observer that pervades his work. How he grabs moments from the lives of metro passengers in his Stainless Seriesso I was able to catch Magyar during a brief pause in his life, full of movement: he always moves forward.
Magyar was born and raised in the Hungarian city of Debrecen, a regional center with 200 thousand inhabitants, immediately west of the Romanian border. His mother was a dentist, his father was an architect and interior designer who created bars and restaurants for a state-owned company in the communist era. The senior Magyar earned money as an artist, making fancy lamps and other household items made of copper in the workshop near his house. “I grew up in my father’s workshop,” Magyar recalls. - I learned to work with tools, gained a common understanding of materials. And I learned to combine different things. " Magyar's parents sent him to an elementary school with in-depth study of music, and he sang in the most prestigious children's choir in Hungary, performing in Finland and Greece, when most trips to the west were forbidden. He enrolled in a technology high school, but found that there was too much theory in the program, and rebelled against discipline. “I was the only one in the class who did not need to wear a uniform. I have never been able to control easily, ”he says. Magyar dropped out of university, learned to program, assembled simple computers and lived on the money that he got as a freelance graphic designer, and besides that, he spent two years running his own business, printing corporate logos on pencils and lighters. He told me: "It was terrible, but it was money." he collected simple computers and lived on the money that he received for his work as a graphic designer-freelancer, and in addition, he spent two years running his own business, printing corporate logos on pencils and lighters. He told me: "It was terrible, but it was money." he collected simple computers and lived on the money that he received for his work as a graphic designer-freelancer, and in addition, he spent two years running his own business, printing corporate logos on pencils and lighters. He told me: "It was terrible, but it was money."
By this time, the Berlin Wall had fallen, the Eastern Bloc had collapsed, and Magyar could quench the growing thirst for wanderings. “I always wanted to travel as I remember. I was about four when I dreamed of running away and wandering around the world, ”he recalls. “My father once told me that there used to be people whose profession was to travel, and I took his words on faith. I liked the idea of living with one suitcase of things, moving from place to place. She seems to be firmly stuck in my head. When I received my first salary, I just left. I think I'm kind of a regular traveler. ” Having traveled with a backpack in Morocco, at 27 he first came to India. “It was the hardest place I've ever been to,” he says. - Colors, smells - all this is difficult to digest. She became for me something like Mecca, and I began to return there every year. "
The life of a regular traveler honed Magyar's skills as an observer and reinforced the feeling that he was an outsider. On the one hand, he was in constant motion. On the other hand, he was able to remain motionless for a long time, simply observing the course of life. Once he spent half a year studying the movement of the river in Varanasi, the ancient religious capital of India, on the banks of the Ganges. During that trip, he asked Zazi to bring him a book for beginner photographers, which he won as a prize back in elementary school. “I was almost thirty,” he said. - And I began to study the aperture values, light and began to print in a dark room. I really liked it. ” A year later, he documented daily life at a private school in Darjeeling, a hill station in the Himalayas in northeast India, and his series of black and white photographs won first place at the annual Hungarian reportage photography contest. “He never worked too fast,” Zazi recalls. “If he thought a person or place was exciting, he spent hours with him.”
But Magyar quickly realized that he was bored with simple documentary photography. He mounted the camera inside the cinema in Varanasi, and took pictures of the audience in almost complete darkness with a shutter speed of one minute. He shot footage of passengers sitting in the backseat of a taxi in Calcutta, and people locked in the doors of the medical emergency room and elevator in Shanghai. Hannah Frieser, former head of Light Work, a cooperative-based artists ’organizer who organized an ambitious exhibition of Magyar Kontinuumat once in three museums of the USA in 2013 - Light Work in Syracuse, the Houston Center for Photography and the Griffin Museum of Photography in Boston - says that “a series with elevators is central in understanding his work. It reflects the idea of taking a camera, making it motionless, and taking pictures of people again and again. He does not look at people with an appreciative look. He avoids asking a lot of questions. Instead, only the experience of observation and presence, and the definition of life through this stream. " This work also reflected Magyar's growing interest in the limitations of human sensory perception compared to what was possible using new and old technologies, and became a prototype of his efforts to push the boundaries of what we can see and experience. “I wanted to put people in a cage, in a way. I thought about how little choice we have, when we choose our path, he told me. “We can only see from a narrow angle, no matter what we do.” Our knowledge is really limited and very few. ”
High-speed camera Optronis, equipped with special components for video shooting Stainless and modified battery.
Magyar began experimenting with scanning in 2003. “I wanted to go beyond the scope of ordinary photography,” he said. - I remember that I slept a little. I spent the whole night thinking how to do it. ” In his early experiment, Magyar assembled his own primitive scanner using an East German slide projector that cast a narrow beam of light. Then he built a platform of Lego blocks, which allowed this beam to "scan" the object, slowly sliding from top to bottom. An ordinary SLR camera saved all scanned lines at a time, collecting one image from them during an exposure in one minute. Thus, the scanner cut a minute of time into thin sections, and the camera collected sections back, creating one image from all these moments. Magyar scanned himself, experimenting with different movements, which created distorted final images. “When I turned, the resulting image showed my body wrapped in a tailspin,” he says. - It was an interesting technological experiment, but nothing more. I abandoned him for several years. "
However, he was still fascinated by the idea of shooting different parts of one person or several people at different times, creating a still image from “small pieces,” as Magyar himself says. This coincided with his growing interest in what he calls the “ever-changing nature of the present,” a constant stream of life that did not yield to attempts at simple visual display.
In 2006, when he spent several months in Shanghai, he had an insight. “I had a feeling that I would, so to speak, scan the flow of people. I started looking for places of the right type, where people would walk at the same speed. ” Magyar first studied escalators in Shanghai malls. Then his gaze fell on the city streets, in particular large intersections or bus stops with a constant flow of people. As soon as a concept appeared in his head, he began to develop a technology in order to implement it. “It was an ongoing study,” he says. “I spent a few weeks before I figured out all the details.”
The answer, as Magyar understood, lay in a modified version of the slit camera, which is used to shoot photo finishes on racetracks and Olympic competitions, recording the sequence of time in one image. Such cameras were rare and cost many thousands of dollars, so Magyar decided to make it himself. He connected a lens from a medium format camera to another sensor and wrote a program for a new device. Total cost: 50 dollars. He turned the traditional scanning method inside out when the sensor moves along a stationary object. This time, the sensor will remain in place while the scanned objects will move, photographed by a strip of one pixel wide (this is the basic principle of the camera for photo finish). Magyar mounted the device on a tripod in a crowded area of Shanghai and scanned pedestrians walking in front of the sensor. Then, on a computer, he combined over 100,000 consecutive lines into high-resolution photographs.
An enlarged fragment of Urban Flow (# 424) , filmed in Hong Kong on a self-assembled version of the slit chamber.
The result was Urban Flow , a series of prints 30 cm high and 2.5 meters long that captured the parade of humanity marching through time. Those on the right walked past the sensor about two minutes earlier than those on the far left. “Every little piece is a present, and all these pieces of the present come together to tell you a story,” Magyar explains. “By the time we see the story, it looks like our memory: it has already passed.”
The eerie distortions of fixed objects and objects in motion remind viewers that they are looking at a graphic image of time, not space. Fast-moving buses were squeezed into cars like Smart. The buses slowed down like passenger planes. Slowly walking people appeared with trousers, their feet stretched out like skis or became narrow, like Oscar Pistorius's composite prostheses. And due to the curious feature of the scanning technology, everyone moved in the same direction. “The horizontal axis does not reflect space, it means not left and right, but sooner and later,” he says. “If two people cross the pixel at the same time, it will look as if they are walking together.”
Urban flowIt is perceived simultaneously comical and with a share of melancholy, as a distorting time and consciousness vision of human destiny and mortality. The choice of black and white display was made after a lot of deliberation. “I experimented with color, but people looked like color confetti, which was not my goal,” says Magyar. - This is not a carnival, for me it is something sad. We are all moving towards the same destination, and it is like death. ”
A video of an enlarged fragment of Urban Flow (# 292) , 2007, filmed in Hong Kong, shows an incredible level of detail when viewed close up.
Lars Torkul, a design engineer living in Shanghai, met Magyar in China and came to his Shanghai apartment to see the process of working on a new project. “This place shocked me with its view,” Torkul recalls. “It was necessary to squeeze past water bottles and other things into the room and inside it to get to the table.” After Torkul saw a hastily assembled prototype for shooting, Magyar showed the first frames of the Urban Flow series on his computer screen. “I was delighted with the beauty and clarity of the images,” says Torkul. - I said: “Adam, this is incredible, are you going to show it?” But he didn’t even think about it ... So many technologies were used that he hadn’t worked with before. He said: “This is far from finished work.” I replied: “What are you talking about? They may be ready very soon! ”
Torkul introduced Magyar to his friend, French artist Thomas Charveria, who had just opened the Island6 gallery in a converted warehouse in the Shanghai Artists Quarter. Sharveria was also fascinated by the slit photographs of Magyar, and he proposed organizing an exhibition. Magyar sold almost all of the ten or so small works that he had printed for the exhibition - for a reasonable price from $ 700 to $ 1,400 - and received several more orders. Magyar was struck by the fact that his work generally had commercial value: “I returned to Hungary, but I knew that on this basis I needed to start doing something.”
“In Zen Buddhism, you can train for five years before you make your first archery shot. And it accurately describes what Adam does. There is no time for him. ”
His next major project was Stainless , filmed inside metro stations in large cities such as Paris, Tokyo and New York. It was a qualitative leap forward. He was able to buy a high-quality industrial camera and a slit scanning device, designed for high-resolution shooting of printed circuit boards, bottles and other objects moving quickly along assembly lines to detect micro-cracks and other defects that cannot be detected with other types of cameras. The slit camera he obtained uses one row of photosensitive sensors to constantly scan objects moving at high speed, removing almost all the distortions.
Stainlessconsciously makes you recall theoretical physics, in particular, sends the viewer to the mental experiments of Albert Einstein. The fixed Magyar camera, aimed at a moving train, echoes Einstein's hypothesis that “remote simultaneity” - the idea that two events separated in space occur at the same time - is not absolute, but depends on the observer's coordinate system. In a famous thought experiment, Einstein imagined two observers - one standing inside a moving carriage of a train, and the second standing on a platform when this train passes by - who perceive the same flash of light at the moment when their paths intersect. The passenger of the train sees that the light hits the front and back of the train at the same time, the stationary observer sees that the light reaches these points at different times. In the same way, Magyar distorts time and shows the subjectivity of human perception: his slit camera transforms a moving spot into a frozen image of impossible clarity and stillness, into a reality that neither passengers arriving at the station nor those waiting for the train on the platform perceive. People on his trains ride together, but at the same time, separately, lost in their own thoughts, often mesmerized by their mobile devices.
“You start to pay attention to how these people interact with their devices, and how little they interact with each other,” says Hannah Freezer, a former executive at Light Work. However, these ghostly images can also be seen as a triumph of human society, which Magyar began to appreciate more when traveling around the world. Strap-on metro passengers in Paris, Shanghai, Hong Kong, New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, Rome and Berlin all find striking similarities in appearance, facial expression and attitude towards others, which overcomes cultural and geographical differences. In her notes for art exhibitions, Magyar Frieser drew a clear line between street photography of recognized artists such as Diane Arbus, Gary Vinogrand and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and how Magyar takes his photographs. “The life he chronographs consists of ordinary people, not the most beautiful, eccentric and poor, who usually attract the attention of photographers,” she wrote. - They looked for differences, while Magyar finds similarities. They moved through the city, while Magyar remained motionless and waited for people to pass by his cell ... He visits more and more cities in different countries and on different continents until the features common to all mankind begin to appear. ”
Photos from the Stainless seriesalso showed the most impressive example of Magyar's indefatigable perfectionism. He desperately wanted to shoot on the Tokyo subway - “an incomparable metro system, an incomparable urban environment” - but a subtle blinking of the light led to overexposed and underexposed frames that looked like vertical lines in his images. Magyar's decision: for a week he traveled on the subway with an exposure meter, measuring the level of lighting at all 290 stations. “I found five stations where the light was high-frequency, so I could start working there,” he recalls. “But the light inside the train was still bad, so I spent three months creating a program that allowed me to get rid of these lines.” Magyar also faced another problem when he was forbidden to work with a tripod in the New York subway system. He had to take it off hand which added even more distortion to the images. He had to spend a few more weeks writing code that fixed them. Lars Torkul, a German structural engineer, compares him to a Zen master. “In Zen Buddhism, you can train for five years before shooting for the first time with a bow. It accurately describes what he does, ”Torkul told me. “There is no time for him.” He lives and performs his work clearly and in all details, just as in his images. ” “There is no time for him.” He lives and performs his work clearly and in all details, just as in his images. " “There is no time for him.” He lives and performs his work clearly and in all details, just as in his images. "
Enlarged fragment of Stainless # 7649
Shortly after the completion of Stainless , Magyar began to think about moving to moving images. After several months of research, he convinced the German manufacturer Optronis to lend him one of the high-performance industrial camcorders worth $ 16 thousand. Such cameras are used for shooting crash tests, studying robotic manipulators and even for analyzing the movement of the hind hooves of horses participating in show jumping competitions. Using high light sensitivity and sophisticated TimeBench analysis software, the Optronis camera captures high-resolution images at an incredible speed: up to 100 thousand frames per second - for comparison, a conventional movie camera shoots at 24 frames per second.
Magyar turned the concept of Stainlessupside down: now, instead of standing on the platform, filming passengers passing by, Magyar was sitting inside a moving car, recording videos of motionless people on the platform, while the train and the camera were entering the station. Einstein’s ghost once again permeates these images, and he again distorted the time: Magyar shot video at a speed 56 times faster than normal, turning the 12-second blurry views of the station into 12-minute films, tormenting with their slowness. Its passengers stand, together, but separately, with an exquisite, three-dimensional grace of statues - only the curvature of the lips or the finger extended towards the iPhone suggests that these people were captured in an ultra slow motion, stuck in a stretching moment. Magyar extracts feelings from a dismissively small moment of time. “I want to capture what happens in milliseconds, the origin of which you don’t even realize, ”he told me. “I am stretching the moment — the present, now,” because, as humans, we only live in the past and the future. But the only existence we have is now, and we don’t even take it into account. ”
Breathtaking Clarity Video Series Stainless- It is also the result of the most complex code that he has ever written. In his experiments with industrial cameras, Magyar found that the image quality was ideal for measuring speed, distance and volume, but was not quite suitable for the artist's needs. He wrote sophisticated programs to improve the quality of images shot in low light and poor contrast. Another problem was digital noise — vertical, horizontal, lines, and other random distortions, a typical problem with high-sensitivity digital sensors. He spent almost two years intermittently devising programs to reduce noise, solving one problem and immediately running into another. “Engineers don't have to work on it, but I have to. I can not sleep. I have been working on this for months and do not stop.
A few days after our first meeting, I agree to meet with Magyar at Alexanderplatz, one of Berlin's most crowded metro stations, to showcase his Stainless project. I arrive at rush hour and wait ten minutes on one side of a platform filled with people until he appears. His long hair is scattered in a black park, which is complemented by black boots, black jeans and a black backpack. In a backpack, Magyar wears his modified Optronis camcorder and laptop. Four cables, blue and black, stick out of his backpack. He says the volumetric equipment makes him feel like “the hero of the Ghostbusters.” After his collision with the police at Union Square, Magyar modified the equipment so that it could be carried in a backpack, but in my opinion, the new layout raises even more suspicions. Six elevated lines and three underground lines converge at Alexanderplatz, creating a constant flow of people all morning. “I'm looking for a place where there are no gaps in the crowd, and the more people, the better,” he tells me.
Together with Magyar we hop on a train and go one station to Rosa Luxemburg Square, then cross the platform and take the next train to Alexanderplatz. In a filled wagon Magyar draws the apparatus out of a backpack. The camera body made of gray aluminum, connected to the viewfinder, pen and cables that connect the device to his laptop, looks like a prototype twisted in a garage. When he points the lens at the window, red and green lights flash. “They always ask me:“ Did you do this yourself? ”” He tells me, while others are watching with curiosity. A few minutes later we roar into the station, and Magyar begins recording. In twelve seconds, everything is ready.
We stand and wait four minutes until eight gigabytes of new data are copied to his laptop (during such trips, he usually takes two external hard drives with him, on which three terabytes of data can be written). Magyar studies a procession of beautifully lit faces that he extracted from a 12-second blur, and claims to be satisfied. To get the results that suit him, he shoots hundreds of hours of video. One of his favorite clips in the series, shot in 2011 at Alexanderplatz, fortunately caught two little girls running skipping along the platform in the background. Their graceful movements contrast with the stillness of people in the foreground - an unexpected reminder that the image in front of the viewer is not a photograph, but a stretched moment - Magyar calls it “inter-time”. “These girls became a real gift for me,”
"His work says that we are alive and that the world is an even more living place than we imagine."
From the Squares series , Hong Kong, 2007-2008. Magyar took many pictures of people, then combined them into huge artificial squares full of people.
Of the many disciplines Magyar has to deal with in his work, the most difficult was marketing. He entered the world of art by accident, and in the early stages of his career was puzzled by how this business works. “It’s not very pleasant to live with the naivety of a 20-year-old when you are 35,” he admitted a couple of days later when we drove through Berlin on a rainy evening in his workshop in the luxurious Savigny-Platz district. Magyar was about to send several prints of Urban Flow to an art exhibition in Miami Beach. “I started doing this at the worst time - 2008, 2009 - when the art market collapsed,” he says. Five years have passed from that moment, and Magyar now receives significantly more money for his work - up to $ 14 thousand for a Stainless print.- but he still finds it unpleasant to engage in business relations and self-promotion, which are necessary for development. “He has no commercial instincts,” says Lars Torkul.
However, Magyar is studying. He became a more confident and persuasive speaker, organically weaving together the conceptual and technological aspects of his work. This year, for the first time, he was able to live only on income from art. His work has been exhibited in galleries from Harvard University to Budapest. In February, his work will be shown as part of an exhibition of three urban life artists at the prestigious Julie Sol Gallery in Manhattan. The exhibition will include a Stainless video and several prints from his Squares series.(“Squares”), created between 2006 and 2009: photographs of hundreds of people taken from pedestrian bridges, then connected together in Photoshop into imaginary city squares, aerial view. “I have nothing to complain about,” says Magyar.
Magyar plans a future installation in the gallery, where he will project several videos on large screens surrounding the audience and accompany the video with ominous sound effects - a slowed-out screech of brakes, the background sound of a metro station. “Sometimes people tell me that when they watch a video, they think about death. It's a bit like getting out of the body, ”he says. Andrew Zolly is Executive Director of Pop Tech, an organization that brings together innovators in art and science. After he was faced with the work of Magyar, he invited the artistmake a presentation at the Pop Tech conference in Camden, Maine. He has a different view of these works. “His work says we're alive,” Zolly insists, “that the world is an even more vibrant place than we imagine.” In any case, life or death, Magyar enjoys any reaction: “What could be better for an artist than that? This is an incredible feeling when you can do what others think about. And when that happens, I'm really happy. ”