SELF-PORTRAIT WITH COWS GOING HOME (Hungary, 1956-2004)

Not long before the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 Sylvia Plachy, then thirteen years old, fled Hungary with her parents. The only things that she could take with her were one small suitcase and her teddy bear. She had to assume that she would never again see the country where she had been born. But much to her surprise, as a naturalised American she received permission time after time to revisit the country. During the forty years in which she paid visits to Hungary she assembled a photo archive from her own work and her family’s photo albums. The result, a search for a lost childhood with Eastern European history as its backdrop, is just as mysterious and unpredictable as memory. The title – after the book that Aperture published in 2004 – refers to a self-portrait of Plachy in the rear-view mirror of an auto, with a farmer driving cows in the background.