Gabor Szilasi

Gabor Szilasi (3 February 1928 – 10 April 2026) was a Canadian photographer known for the humanist vision of his social-documentary photography.

Career Szilasi first became interested in photography while in medical school in 1948. Largely self-taught, he started to photograph in Hungary in 1952, when he purchased his first camera, a Zorki (the Soviet copy of Leica II), after years of working as a labourer building the Budapest Metro.

He emigrated to Canada in 1957, settling in Montreal. From 1959 to 1971, he was a photographer at the Office du film du Québec. That role involved travelling to photograph subjects throughout rural Quebec. Sam Tata introduced him to the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson and encouraged his social-documentary photography. In 1966, he was introduced to the work of the American documentary tradition as practised by Paul Strand and Walker Evans while studying at the Thomas More Institute. From 1972 to 1974, Szilasi was a member of a group of Montreal artists called the Group d'action photographique, and his documentary photographs feature numerous members of the city's art scene. He used the camera to take views of urban environments, individual portraits or gallery openings.

After 20 years of photographing in black-and-white, around the mid-1970s, Szilasi began to use colour to describe certain cultural and social characteristics. He began photographing interiors, mostly living spaces, in colour and later combined colour with black-and-white to convey portraits and interiors. Around 1982, he began photographing electric signs.

He is the subject of Gabor, a 2021 documentary film by Joannie Lafrenière.

Personal life and death Szilasi was married to the photographer Doreen Lindsay.

He died at his home in Montreal on 10 April 2026, at the age of 98.

Selected exhibitions In 1997, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts organized a travelling retrospective of his work titled Gabor Szilasi: Photographs 1954–1996. In 2017, Montreal's McCord Museum exhibited a 20-year selection of his unpublished photographs of the art world in Montreal, titled The Art World in Montreal, 1960–1980.

Awards Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts, 2010 Paul-Émile Borduas prize for visual arts, 2010 Companion of the arts and letters of Quebec Knight, Order of Montreal, 2024

Selected public collections His work is included in the collections of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, the National Gallery of Canada