Monochrome Improvisation
TITLE
Documentary Portraits
CATEGORIES
Budapest, Hungary
LOCATIONS
2025
DATE
A portrait series shaped by a childhood split between operating rooms and smoke-filled bars and drunken dawns — where a father vanished, but the music stayed, the only rhythm strong enough to hold a life together.
Monochrome Improvisation” captures what music feels like when it becomes breath.
A series born from the instinct to fill silence —
to answer it with rhythm, with movement, with the kind of sound that is more prayer than performance.
These images hold unrepeatable moments:
the instant before a note forms,
the pulse of a breath,
the fragile space where emotion turns into shape.
In monochrome, every gesture becomes pure.
Every pause becomes visible.
Nothing distracts — only the essence remains.
This is not about stillness.
It is about the need for sound,
the urgency to keep the world vibrating
so the silence never fully settles.
This series was born from the sound of a childhood cut open — from the deepest absence a father can leave behind. By day he was a surgeon; by night, a pianist in smoke-filled bars. He carried his daughter through drunken dawns on a horse-drawn carriage where a gypsy prímás — who spoke seven languages — played his song, the melody rising above the clatter of glasses and the dim, trembling lights. Then he left. And the music stayed. The only thing that did. It held her for a lifetime — because inside, she remained that abandoned little girl.
Created with Midjourney V6 (raw), refined in Lightroom. Monochrome tones shaped to echo the structure and tension of jazz improvisation.
ORSOLYA ESZLARI
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © 2025