The Clear Image of Paradise
The series examines how we created parallel universes as children to escape reality. While the artist’s own childhood memories inspire the project, it seeks to move beyond personal recollection toward a broader, shared experience. It revisits those gestures that once allowed us to transform our reality: we wore costumes, built hideouts, and through stories, created entirely new worlds. The central setting of the series is the artist’s childhood garden, which appears both as a physical location and as a symbolic shelter, an archetypal space of withdrawal and transformation. As children, we create inner shelters in response to a world that often feels unpredictable and overwhelming. Through imagination, however, reality can be reorganized, transformed into something more bearable. The project reflects on longing, absence, self-definition, inner transformation, and how we reinterpret our surroundings to regain a sense of control, safety, and coherence.
The series is titled The Clear Image of Paradise, a phrase borrowed from a line in Peter Handke’s poem “Songs of Childhood”. The title points to the paradox of childhood memory: the longing for an image that appears pure and sharply defined, yet is inevitably constructed and fragile. It evokes an idealized inner landscape, a mental image of paradise that exists not as a fixed reality but as a carefully assembled vision shaped by memory and desire. gestures. Through these elements, the work visualizes the framework of parallel worlds with simple tools, the invention of roles, and the reshaping of space as an act of inner agency. The analogue process, with its material and time-based nature, reinforces the layered quality of memory and contrasts with the speed of contemporary image production.
The project’s development began as part of the Capazine – Let’s Stage workshop at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center in Budapest.
Judit Gyuricza-Osváth (b. 1992, Debrecen) is a Hungarian photographer who received her MA in Photography from Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in 2026. Rooted in personal experience and shaped by a documentary sensibility, her practice explores memory, identity, inner emotional processes, and everyday life. Her works have been exhibited at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, TOBE Gallery, Szerkesztőség Gallery in Budapest, Collegium Hungaricum Belgrade, and Photon Gallery in Ljubljana. Her project The Clear Image of Paradise will be presented as part of the BredaPhoto International Talent Programme 2026.
