From the series Last Steps London - Surbiton Station, Surbiton – Berrylands (King Charles Road corner)
2022–2023
digital capture; digital print
60 × 50 cm / each
…Believe it or not, it happened exactly the way I’m telling you. There we were, at a London airport. This is where we “had to” live from now on. My 16-year-old daughter and I got our new jobs through an agency as live-in nannies and housekeepers at separate households in London. We had no choice. No help. I had lost my position as a teacher and my mortgage rates skyrocketed. So the surrealistic, Kafkaesque period of my life in London began.
Don’t get me wrong, I was twenty when I first longed to visit England. But I had never managed before now. Now I wasn’t here because I wanted to be but because I had no other choice. Quite a difference! (Previously, my plan was to complete my third degree and teach in higher education, while running my successful artisan workshop). I was over 50, but I was working twelve to thirteen hours every day at multiple households. As I barely spoke English, I couldn’t pick and choose. I took whatever work came my way. Adapting was not easy. I suffered from an identity crisis, dissonance and strange, incomprehensible dreams…
But like everything in life, this came to an end too.
And now, as I reflect on the past, on those days, in the last couple of years I try to summon those feelings and express them through my photography. I strongly believe that if I were to make sense of those difficult and yet somehow calm and happy times it would be through the magic of photography. In my creative process as a photo artist, I never could disassociate myself from the life I was living. My work and my creations are here to express my joys, my sorrows, and my accomplishments.
Ilona Nyilas, 2026
photo: Nyilas Ilona
Ilona Nyilas
(1954, Budapest)
Ilona Nyilas graduated from the University of Szeged with a degree in educational pedagogy (boarding school teaching), and from Eszterházy Károly University with degrees in dance and drama pedagogy, and in ethics teaching. She works with analogue techniques, primarily gelatine silver prints, solarisation, photograms, and hand-colouring black-and-white prints. She created postcards for the Zsigray Postcard Studio between 1985 and 1995. In 1986–1987, together with cinematographer Irén Bíró, she made the experimental video documentary on itinerant photographers, titled Kopogós [From Door to Door]. She is a member of the Association of Hungarian Photographers, whose commemorative medal she received in 1980, while she was awarded the special prize for art pedagogy from the Art Theory Section of the Hungarian Academy of Arts in 2018, and the Hungarian Golden Cross of Merit in 2022. Her works can be found at the Hungarian Museum of Photography, the National Theatre History Museum and Institute, as well as in private collections in Budapest and London.