PHOTOGRAPHER KATA GEIBL
Kata Geibl
A photographer making images about capitalism, truth, and the stories the western world told us to believe.
Kata Geibl does not take photographs to prove anything. Coming from a background in liberal arts, she draws concepts from philosophy and cultural studies, then steps in with metaphorical images to fill the gaps where words fall short.
Her long-standing interest is photography's ambiguity, the way we are trained to treat photographs as evidence while approaching them with deep suspicion. Harnessing that tension, she mixes genres to build a visual universe that is as much a commentary on our relationship to images as it is on the implications of capitalism.
Antakly Projects · Photography Series · Budapest
In the studio, Budapest.
Kata Geibl (1989, Budapest) is a photographer living and working in Budapest. After a Bachelor's degree in Photography from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, she continued at the KABK in The Hague in the Photography and Society Masters Program. She is currently enrolled in the PhD program at MOME, where she is also a lecturer, teaching creative photography in the BA program and a course on photobook-making in the MA.
She has exhibited internationally, including at UNSEEN Amsterdam, FOAM Amsterdam, the Art Encounters Biennale in Timisoara, Images Gibellina, 212 Photography Istanbul, The Rencontres d'Arles, and the Athens Photo Festival. She was part of the FOAM Talent selection in 2022, received the emerging talent Paris Photo Carte Blanche Award and the Jozsef Pecsi Photography Scholarship, was a Grand Prix Finalist at Fotofestiwal Lodz and a talent for the Futures Platform, won the PHmuseum Vogue Italia Prize, and was shortlisted for the Palm Photo Prize. In 2025 she received an Honourable Mention at the Grand Prix Images Vevey.
Geibl's work is rooted in global concerns, the neoliberal economy and its consequences for contemporary society, approached from a subjective point of view. Drawing on Mark Fisher and Fredric Jameson's writing on postmodernity, she interrogates the idea of truth, and what we take for granted as absolute truth.
Above all, her photographs reflect a sustained concern for our social and ethical values, asking the viewer to question rather than simply to believe.
Your greatest inspirations or influences?
I try to step away from photography in terms of inspiration, because I believe it influences me too much. In my teenage years, I aspired to become a film director, but after working on a film set I quickly changed my mind and luckily found my way back to photography.
Movies are my greatest inspirations, most significantly the modernism of the 1960s and the postmodern era that followed. Tarkovsky, Kubrick, Alain Resnais, Wim Wenders, Fellini, classics that inspire me to this day. For example, Antonioni's film Blow-Up is one of the reasons I became a photographer.
Tell us a bit about your creative process and things you are looking forward to this year?
My creative process is very similar in all of my projects. I always envision the outcome first. What I want to achieve, how the images should look, the concept that will glue them together. This process is probably what takes the most time. For instance, before I even start taking images I make a sketchbook where I collect all my ideas, make a moodboard, sketch out my images, and make notes of what I read. Only after I am confident that what I want to say is also understandable for the public can the photographing start.
This year I am looking forward to finishing my long-term project, which will take shape as a dummy and a small publication. And after that, diving into a new project, which is always very exciting.
How has this year changed your creativity or how you see the world changing moving forward?
This year had a huge impact on me as a person, and with this also on my artistic practice. I finally had time to reflect on what I am doing and why I am doing it, and most importantly for whom. Basically, why I felt stuck in the past few years when everything seemed to go perfectly regarding my career.
This realization was manifested in my Master's Thesis, which I just finished a couple of days ago: how artists, creators, and photographers are stuck in the endless promises of exposure. Artists adapting to the conditions of market logic and trends, under the immense pressure of creating new work which quickly becomes commodities made for consumption with a short expiration date. In short, how the marketization of art affects young artists, and how it has normalized competitive individualism as opposed to creating a strong community.
We are currently working on the design of this publication so that I can present an otherwise serious and controversial issue in a playful and easily digestible way.
Who do you consider to be an icon of our time?
Everyone who is working on the front lines to fight the pandemic.
Do you think the art world needs to change, and if so how can it be improved?
Definitely, it needs to change. It is very much unsustainable in the long term. The endless promises of exposure, the lowering of freelance rates, the standardizing of the exchange of free labor for visibility, the normalizing of competitive individualism. The everyday reality of creators, artists, and photographers, the entrepreneurs of culture.
But I am very hopeful, because more and more people are speaking about these issues, and I sincerely hope a change is coming.
How can we survive in our current growth and success-oriented capitalist system? Can we collectively break the narrative of individualism?
A racehorse staring at us, blindfolded.
A golden ladder in a tranquil mountain range.
The weight we carry to keep the system standing.
Carefully planned images are mixed with stream-of-consciousness texts. A poetic approach emerges through allegories, personal short stories, and image pairs. The project deals with the rampant individualism that underpins our contemporary social, political, and economic system, and in particular the environmental impact it has.
My aim with the series is not to lecture, or to lay down a strict story, nor to interpret economic issues, but to take the viewer on a journey. There are no clear answers, but instead ambiguous questions, which we have to ask sooner or later, as we are not only heirs of the system but also suffer under it.
The starting point lies in my anxiety and frustration with the contemporary condition. A mistrust of the narratives that our privileged western free-world societies laid down for us. Under a neoliberal economy, we are the main beneficiaries and establishers of capitalism. We negligently ignore those we exploit in order to maintain the system.
Kata Geibl, nominated by Hyeres, on Futures →Images courtesy of the artist, from the series There Is Nothing New Under the Sun. Follow Kata Geibl on Instagram.
Part of the Antakly Projects photography archive, conversations with the image-makers questioning how we see. Explore more photography interviews.
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