Gábor Kerekes

Born: 1945
Died: 2014
Gender: Male
Active: Hungary
 
Self-taught Hungarian contemporary photographer. He has been active for 30 years; initially he worked as a technical photographer and then for six years as a press photographer.For the past ten years he has been aiming at a metaphorical representation of the relation between "Art and Science." His technical processes range from the camera obscura through historical photographic techniques to large-scale professional methods. Winner of the Béla Balázs Award.

---

Over Roswell - The Story
 
The town of Roswell lies in the state of New Mexico in the United States at latitude 33.4° N and longitude 104.5° W.
 
In 1947 locals found three dead aliens in a crashed UFO on the outskirts of the town. The FBI and the CIA kept silent and hushed up the incident. The murkiness surrounding this mysterious case has been a source of scandal and controversy ever since.
 
I came across a computer program called "U.S.A. Photomap". With this program you can download a photo-quality satellite image of anywhere in America by giving the geographical coordinates. The maximum resolution is 1 metre/pixel, so on 17 inch monitor with a resolution of 1,024 pixels you can see 1,024 metres. This sparked my imagination. Casting myself in the role of the Roswell aliens, I wondered how this place would look from space.
 
I gave the coordinates. Slowly, square by square, the monitor was filled by the full image. What luck! I overshot the centre of the town, ending up about 600-800 metres away from the inhabited area.
 
A curious, exciting sight greeted my eyes. Lines, circles and squares in a geometrical, abstract arrangement of symbols.
 
You couldn't help but think that these geometrical symbols on the surface of the Earth were intended to convey a message or information. The sight offered an exceptionally varied and almost undecodable configuration. If I were an alien, I'd land here!
 
I cut out details of the picture by "screenshot", added pixels due to the low resolution and printed them. I photographed the print-outs by large film format, and contact printed the negatives on pigmented print. This is how this Roswell collection was made.
 
From digital - to analogue!