Gabor Szilasi spent his life making photographs of the present, the ordinary stuff of everyday life that most people walk past without registering: A crucifix above a television set, a car salesman leaning on a hood at the Auto Show, the neon signs of Sainte-Catherine Street glowing at dusk. He understood that the present becomes history the moment the shutter closes. He never wasted a frame.
He died on April 10, 2026, at the age of 98, at home in Montreal. He had lived here for the better part of seven decades, long enough to photograph the city through at least three complete transformations.
Born in Budapest in 1928 into a cultured family with deep roots in the arts (his grandfather painted portraits for European royalty; music filled the house), Szilasi came to photography sideways, through catastrophe. Most of his family was Jewish, and although they had converted to Lutheranism, the Nazis made no such distinctions. His mother was deported and killed in a concentration camp. His medical studies were interrupted when he and his father were caught trying to flee communist Hungary in 1949 and imprisoned for five months. He bought his first camera in 1952, after years of labouring on the Budapest Metro—a cheap Soviet-made imitation of the Leica that serious photographers dreamed about. In 1956, he documented the Hungarian Revolution with it before fleeing the country.
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