ÉVA SZOMBAT

Éva Szombat is a photographer based in Budapest, Hungary. Her works explore themes of happiness, mental well-being, desire, memory, self-acceptance, and sexuality by using colorful visuals with a subtle political edge. The projects combine documentary methodology with an emphasis on presentation and installation, mixing spontaneous and staged elements, complemented by interviews and texts by the subjects or experts. The final form of the projects is often a photobook.

She previously self-published two books on themes of well-being: Happiness, and Practitioners. The series I Want Orgasms, Not Roses won the Robert Capa Grand Prize in 2021, later published by Kehrer Verlag in collaboration with Everybody Needs Art in 2022. In 2023 the book was a joint winner at Belfast Photo Festival Photo-Book Award. Her project about nostalgia, titled Echo in Delirium, was completed late in 2024, and was released also in book form in cooperation with Symposion and Everybody Needs Art. Then, in 2025, Echo In Delirium was shortlisted for the Rencontres d’Arles Book Awards and the Paris Photo - Aperture PhotoBook Awards.

Her works were displayed in numerous festivals and exhibitions such as Unseen Amsterdam, 212 Photography Istanbul, Belfast Photo Festival, White Box (New York), Imago Lisboa, Foto Wien, Krinzinger Schottenfeld (Vienna), Galleri Image (Aarhus), Fotografica Bogota, National Museum Warsaw, Robert Capa Center, Ludwig Museum.

She was selected for the FUTURES Photography talent programme in 2018. Since 2020, she has been a member of the Secondary Archive Central and Eastern European Women's Art Platform. She earned her MA in Photography from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME), and studied Visual Communication at ESAG Penninghen in Paris on an Erasmus scholarship. She is currently attending doctoral school and teaching photography at MOME.