Photographer Éva Szombat challenges the cyclical and absurd nature of nostalgia

When the Budapest-based photographer Éva Szombat found the fashion of her childhood reemerging in 2017, she was teaching photography at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design. Around campus, she saw young students who were dressed like her parents in the 1980s and 1990s. She found that people who never existed in that era were passionate about its objects and clothes, they were “nostalgic for a time they never experienced”. It was an echo of the past, and now, Éva has curated the nostalgic delirium of the present.

The point of the project is repetition, or as Éva calls it: “the idea that everything that surrounds us has already been experienced once, that what others treasure has already been our object of use, and that what once meant a lot is devoured by the institution of nostalgia and reproduced as a copy”. It’s an idea that was made popular by Jean Baudrillard and later, Mark Fisher, who described the present as “eternal”, never truly progressing due to a cultural fascination with nostalgia. It’s a type of microwaved past. “Echo In Delirium deals mainly with the object culture and design of the eighties and nineties, when the Eastern European region went from socialism (in western culture they often call it communism) to capitalism,” says Éva.

The book is filled with gorgeously glossy collections of cultural ephemera, trapped in liminal spaces that transcend time. A wax mannequin of a flexing Arnold Schwarzenegger, kitschy murals of Mr Bean painted on wooden doors, clunky hunks of early computers and fading paintings of tropical beaches hanging over crumpled posters of Leonardo DiCaprio – all of these insightful photographs (shot on a small analogue camera) present the chokehold of the past on the present, objects and aesthetics that have stopped and stayed way past their cultural expiry date. When Éva caught the red-eye effect in her subjects, she didn’t want to retouch it, as this visual flaw reminded her of the “ruined images of the past”.

“Our society has been hit so hard recently, with the economic crisis, inflation, covid, war in the neighbourhood – young people find it hard to imagine the future. Apparently it is much more comforting to look back to a past when everything was fine,” says Éva. “So, this book is somewhat of a self-reassuring nostalgia trip, but at the same time, it’s not a completely uncritical look back at the past. We long for a better past, although this is often deceptive because we remember selectively; not everything was good back then either.” The book’s spiral spine is a clever nod to our culture’s never ending cyclicality, representing the present as a helix of strange historical artefacts – the title refers to the Greek myth of Echo, a nymph who was cursed by Hera to repeat only the last words of others. During the shooting of this project, Éva found that even people from her millennial age bracket held objects from the past in high regard, keeping their Tamagotchis, Polly Pockets and Furbies.

Another element of this hysterical spiral into the past is the exhibition, which is as much of the photobook as the photos – it’s as if the spirit of the book jumped out into the room and continued to haunt modern spaces. Éva sought to recreate the wall patterns in museum spaces (to most, this looks more like their grandmother’s living room), and she custom-made picture frames that evoked graphics from the past. The exhibition space became a collage of objects, including photographer carpets, pinball machines and curtains featuring printed toys and Freddy Krueger, becoming more than just the photobook, but its own thing entirely. Echo In Delirium, as a diptych, contains the absurdity of the past inside of the babushka doll of the present – and in the process, prompts the viewer to wonder if there will ever be a future that won’t eat nostalgia to survive.