CAPAZINE – LET’S STAGE! was a workshop initiated by the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center in 2024, focusing on the theoretical and practical aspects of staged photography. Through lectures by international and Hungarian experts, studio visits, and an almost year-long collaborative process, participants developed new photographic projects exploring staging as a contemporary artistic approach.

Within this framework, I developed “Through the Wall”, a project that engages with cruising as a specific, hidden use of urban space—sites where men seek one another for casual sexual encounters shaped by histories of exclusion, secrecy, and the need for invisibility. Although social conditions have changed, cruising remains integral to queer culture, sustained by a paradox of desire, adrenaline, and perceived safety. This paradox forms the starting point of my work: how can one create images of a world built on concealment, where photography is forbidden or impossible? In Through the Wall, I photographed cruising sites and reanimated them using artificial intelligence. Through AI-generated figures, light, and surreal elements, I construct staged images that evoke the atmosphere of these spaces rather than document them. The work emphasizes that any visual representation of cruising is always a construction; the staged photograph functions both as a method and a metaphor, underlining that cruising cannot be reduced to a single image but only exists through presence, bodies, and fleeting intimacy, and that any attempt to depict it is necessarily a fiction—a projection, a staging.

Workshop, Curation: Balázs Zoltán Tóth, Emese Mucsi