At The Lake

At the Lake explores Lake Balaton in Hungary as a public bathing site and former meeting place between East and West, connecting personal memory with a contemporary observation of everyday social life.

For decades, the lake served as a unique meeting point during the Cold War, becoming a place of longing for many East Germans - a space where political borders temporarily seemed to fade.

I was born in the early 1980s to a German mother and a Hungarian father and spent my summers at Balaton. My father photographed these holidays on color film with a Praktica, a camera produced in the former GDR, mainly to preserve family memories. After his early death, the camera remained.

Many years later, I returned to the lake with the same camera and film. The series was photographed during a single summer afternoon at a small public beach section, observing how people share time, space, and fleeting moments of closeness while largely remaining strangers.