Every year, my mother recounts her postcard collection. Her carefully organized collection now contains over five thousand postcards. I have my own category: the cards I send her from foreign countries. In 2025, however, not a single new card made it into this category. I traveled half the world, yet I couldn’t manage to address and send even one. In my family, a postcard is not just an image. It’s a gesture. A physical proof that I’m okay, and that despite the distance, I remain connected to my home. It’s one of photography’s simplest, yet most intimate forms.
Sending postcards has become a forgotten gesture in our time. Postcard collections grow slowly now, as the physical format has been replaced by digital image sharing. Yet this shift has stripped away something essential: the tangible presence, the deliberate act of choosing, writing, and sending.
My travels are dreamlike: a transitional state, detached from everything. During my journeys, sending postcards always pulled me back to reality. Simultaneously a signal home and a bond to what I temporarily left behind.
In 2025, I created my own postcards. These images depict the places as I experienced them: dreamlike, sometimes not reflecting reality at all. The narrative is organized around an absence, but remains open. Capturing a floating, transitional state where travel, detachment, and connection exist simultaneously.
Emese Tóthová
Emese Tóthová (1997) was born in Slovakia and currently lives and works in Paris and Budapest. She graduated in 2022 with a BA in Photography from Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest, and in 2024 pursued her Master’s at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. Since 2019 she is a member of the Studio of Young Photographers. She held her first solo exhibition at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center in 2024.
Tóthová’s work is a study of the “floating state”. The moments where detachment and connection coexist. Drawing from her experiences living in many different countries, she investigates how physical and emotional distance affects our sense of home. Her practice often centers on the “unspoken gesture”: the postcard never sent, the ancestral name carried as a burden, or the childhood game re-enacted in an adult apartment. By blending personal archives with performative actions, Tóthová asks how we can prepare for the future, specifically motherhood and adulthood, while still reconciling with the “closed systems” of our family histories. Her images serve as self-awareness exercises, balancing the liberation of play with the anxieties of responsibility.
ProfessionPhotographer
IdentityWoman, White
LocationEastern Europe, Western Europe, France, Hungary
