Adrian Alcott

A visual investigation through socialist Hungary and contemporary Paris, blending observation, fiction, and family history to explore the blurred lines between truth and storytelling, surveillance, memory, and a mysterious neighbor.

Adrian Alcott

This photo project is a layered visual narrative that connects socialist Hungary and contemporary Paris, weaving together fact and fiction to explore surveillance, memory and fiction . What began as casual observation of my neighbor from the window in my Paris apartment slowly turned into a daily ritual and, eventually, an obsession.

The man I couldn't help not to photograph, despite the guilt of observing someone secretly, became the central figure of an invented biography. I imagined him as a writer or a journalist. This speculation echoed my own family history and the life of my grandfather, a Hungarian journalist and writer who served as a foreign correspondent in Cairo during the 1970s. His career was marked by a duality common to many intellectuals in socialist Hungary: he was both surveilled and, at times, asked to write some reports for the government.

My grandfather blurred the boundaries between truth and fiction in his own writing, publishing books that mixed reportage with his imagination. That narrative strategy became a model for my own approach. In the photobook, I blend the photographs taken from my window in Paris and archival documents, including pages from my grandfather’s actual state surveillance file which I accessed through Hungary’s historical archives.

My neighbor became an extention of my grandfather, and the fiction I constructed for him triggers a dialogue between invented lives and documented histories. The book deliberately plays with ambiguity and the lack of information: what is real, and what is imagined? What does it mean to observe and to be observed?

Birds appear throughout the series as recurring metaphors for surveillance: omnipresent yet often unnoticed. Their gaze reflects the hidden system of control that shaped my grandfather’s generation. During the socialist era, it was present everywhere but even nowadays, this phenomenon still has  profound consequences in Hungarian society and its social dynamics.

Ultimately, this is also a story about grief, absence, speculation and the inherited secrecy. It is also about the power of images and archives to construct new narratives. The book's title references my grandfather’s pseudonym he created for himself to write some novels: András Kereszty, alias Adrian Alcott and alias the mysterious neighbor.

I would like to develop this book into something more in-depth. This ongoing project is currently in a first version dummy stage, and I would like to refine the narrative structure, sequence, and book design. I would like to blend my own photographs with found imagery and my grandfather's surveillance documents, broaden the storytelling of the pictures I have collected from family archive and from online archive sites.