Lilla Szasz fell into the underworld when she began documenting teen girls living in a detention home in Budapest. Here, she met girls who had turned to sex work to survive. While they were locked up, pimps waited outside the gates for their release, with ample supplies of drugs to keep them caught in a cycle of addiction and debt.
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Their tragic stories spoke to Szasz. She yearned to know more about the people living on the edge, on the margins of society. In 2008, she travelled to downtown Budapest, where she met Monica and Michael, young sex workers who shared a flat. Their neighbours had been extorting them, threatening to call the police, so they moved to a larger place in the slums, where no one cared what they did.
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At the age of 23, Monica left her home in the countryside, having been regularly abused by her alcoholic father. She met a man that she wanted to marry, discovered he visited sex workers, and broke up with him. To get revenge, she became a sex worker, and like her father, she began to drink. She met Michael, 31, who was already hustling, in a bar. She moved in with him, and together they were able to cover all orientations and needs of their clients. A drag queen named Alexander, 22, later joined them. The two men became a couple, highly volatile in nature, marked by physical abuse and mind games.
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Their years together were filled with love and strife, by jealousies, betrayals, poverty, and fights. Yet they were a family, a deeply unhappy family, but bonded to each other all the same. Szasz’s photographs tell the story of three people trying to create a home, searching for love that they are unable to sustain or nourish. Trapped in a cycle of pain and addiction, they struggle to survive.
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The toxicity of the environment eventually caused Szasz to end the project, which she titled “Mother Michael Goes to Heaven” – after Michael committed suicide in the flat in 2010. Like so many people who have never known a good family, these three found their way to each other and held on as long as they could. Szasz speaks with us about her experiences with people who were living on the edge, desperately trying to create a family yet unable to meet their own basic needs.
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All Photos: Lilla Szász: Mother Michael Goes to Heaven, part from series (2008-2010)