Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1928; lives and works in Montreal.

A pioneer of photographie d’artin Quebec, Gabor Szilasi has influenced an entire generation of Canadian photographers. Szilasi has photographed Montreal and rural Quebec for more than forty years, adopting a social realism approach to portray aspects of contemporary life. Whether methodically documenting, in frontal views, architecture and development along a major artery like Sainte-Catherine Street, or revealing specific spaces at the neighbourhood level (here the intersection of Marie-Anne and Rivard streets), Szilasi gives equal importance to human figures and to the minute details of the environment. The relationship between architecture and citizens, and its place in the collective memories of a city and its communities, remain his principal concerns.

Gabor Szilasi’s work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Canada, France, Hungary, Italy and Poland. VOX organized a retrospective of his work for the 1997 Mois de la Photo à Montreal, Gabor Szilasi: Photographs 1954–1996, shown at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa (1998), as well as the Encontros de Imagem, Braga, Portugal, and the Centre national d’exposition, Jonquière (1999). A new retrospective will be held at the Musée d’art de Joliette in May 2008. Gabor Szilasi’s work is on view in several public collections. He taught photography from 1979 to 1995 at Concordia University in Montreal.