Over the years, I've come to understand that my connection to Bèla's work wasn't solely an aesthetic matter, even though the aesthetic was, and remains, dazzling to me. What truly captivated me was something else: the feeling of encountering a gaze capable of going beyond the image and touching a deeper, harder-to-explain place. There are photographers who take good photos. There are photographers who build a body of work. And then there are those rare individuals whose gaze isn't just observed; it stays and lives with you. For me, Bèla belongs to that category.
I’ve always told her, half-seriously and half-jokingly, that she's our Annie Leibovitz. But even that comparison sometimes falls short, because what I've felt with many of her images has less to do with scale or fame than with intensity. Some of her photographs have evoked in me exactly what art, when it truly appears, can evoke: an inner alteration, a kind of serene vertigo, that small disorder of the soul that reminds you that you are still alive. It doesn’t happen to me with many works. But when it does, I know it. And with Bèla, it has happened many times.
Her images have accompanied me in good times, but also in difficult ones. And that, for me, is decisive. Because there, art ceases to be about taste, decoration, or culture, and becomes a support. Salvation, even. Being surrounded by certain works, living with them, looking at them again and again, returning to them when something inside needs to be put in order, has been a very real form of companionship in my life. Bèla's work has occupied that place. Not as a luxury, but as a presence. As a way to remember beauty when one truly needs it.
Within that universe, there is also a figure who has been fundamental to me: Edita. She first appeared as Bèla's muse in those early images that completely fascinated me, and over time, she also became, for me, an intimate icon, a very important presence within my own imagination. I have seen Bèla photograph her over the years with extraordinary sensitivity, accompanying her transformation without ever losing the initial mystery. That relationship between them, sustained through campaigns, personal works, and shared time, has always deeply moved me. It wasn't just a model in front of a camera. It was a visual story in progress. A complicity. A way of building beauty through continuity, through trust, through something that closely resembled creative fidelity.
I believe this is also why, for years, I felt an almost physical need to have her works close by. To live with them. To incorporate them into my collection, my spaces, my life. I particularly remember the first photograph I bought from her, an image of Kate Moss that I keep as a small personal relic. It wasn't just a purchase. It was a confirmation. A way of telling myself that what had accompanied me inwardly for so long could also occupy a tangible place in my world.
My approach to Bèla had something of devotion, something of innocent strategy, and much of true admiration. There were openings, visits, messages, meetings sought with the pure desire to get closer to someone whose work already meant so much to me. And little by little, the real relationship, the closeness, the trust, the exchange came about. Until one day she invited me to her home.
Entering there was an experience difficult to exaggerate without sounding like it. Because there are spaces that one idealizes for years and that, upon visiting them, become smaller. Here the opposite happened. Bèla's house not only confirmed the initial intuition: it amplified it, made it physical, made it emotionally overwhelming. Everything was there as I had dreamed it and, at the same time, better. The works propped up, the found objects, the mix of memory, intuition, visual culture, and real life. The studio integrated into the house, the house integrated into the work. Nothing contrived. Nothing frozen. Everything alive. Everything inhabited.
What impressed me most was not the isolated beauty of a corner or a piece, but the total coherence of the whole. That place contained, in a very precise way, many of the things that have always mattered most to me: photography, art, design, character, rarity, memory, sensibility, collection, family, time. It wasn't just a house. It was a way of being in the world. And entering it was, for me, entering one of those few places that you don't just admire: you recognize.
