The Epic Love Story of a Warrior

Peter Puklus builds twentieth-century Central and Eastern European history out of studio props, staged bodies, and one invented family. The result reads less like a photo essay than a private myth assembled from evidence.

Puklus follows an anonymous young man who wants to move from East to West, working across sculptural still-life, constructed sets, and self-portraiture, and using the region's scarred history as raw material for scenes that mix documentary residue with plain invention. The book was produced with SPBH Editions as the ninth title in the SPBH Book Club and is meant to be read right to left. A line from Marina Tsvetaeva's poem on falling into an abyss, translated by Ilya Shambat, runs letter by letter along the foot of every page, tying the family's private drama to a longer history of loss.

Puklus was born in Cluj-Napoca, Transylvania, and works out of Budapest, treating the studio as a stage for questions of fatherhood, labor, and inherited masculinity. He is associated with FUTURES, the European platform for emerging photographers. His other books, including Handbook to the Stars and Loss and Found, return again to constructed, provisional images of family life under political pressure.