An excerpt from the portfolio of Gregor Törzs in 1605 Magazine No.3 Duality

Images: Gregor Törzs

It’s not only the result but, rather, the process that’s crucial for Gregor Törzs (b. 1970, Hamburg, Germany). Before shifting focus to his fine art photography, striking and effervescent in black-and-white, Törzs worked in advertising, fashion and filmmaking. From his time as a cinematographer and lighting technician, he picked up techniques that would make his later work all the more impactful. Each of his photographs is a meditation on time, memory and the delicate force that pulses through all living things. From his base in Berlin, he reveals the world as he sees it through his lens. 

A great image, in artist Gregor Törzs’s world, begins with an idea, a theme, a thought. Then it’s about capturing it with the right light and from the right angle. And finally? It’s processing: printing his photographs on thin, waxed paper, a technique mostly forgotten by others in his field. Every platinum-palladium print is crafted by hand, the metal salts creating luminous depths impossible to achieve through conventional methods. The Japanese Gampi paper he favours is translucent yet durable; it mirrors his subjects' own paradoxical nature: fragile yet eternal, ephemeral yet unforgettable.

The beauty and the richness of nature grip Törzs; the histories of what’s alive or has lived run through his mind on a loop. His portraits are not of people. Instead, he’s dedicated to capturing and telling the stories of the coral, the trees, the butterflies, the snails. He’s writing the narrative of the earth. His underwater work, captured with a custom-built camera called the Ultramarine, transforms aquatic landscapes into skulptural visions. The fluorescent glow of uranium glass becomes otherworldly under his lens. Even larch trees, photographed during their brief autumn transformation, emerge as haunting inversions of themselves.