Background Gabor Szilasi was born in
Budapest,
Hungary, in 1928. He was born
Jewish but raised
Lutheran as a way to protect him from
anti-Semitic violence against he and his family. In 1944, most of his family was imprisoned by the
Nazis during
The Holocaust. Gabor Szilasi's mother died in a
concentration camp, but the rest of the family survived. Gabor Szilasi's brother and sister died young. He started studying in medical school, but after he and his father were caught trying to escape
communist Hungary in 1949, the Communists did not allow him to continue studying medicine.
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==