Attention deficit, synesthesia, and difficulties fitting in, are burdens in everyday life, but they can be advantages for artistic self-expression. We spoke with Flóra Borsi, photographer and illustrator for the Young and Beautiful issue of The Continental Literary Magazine, about various artistic milieus, unconventional creative processes, and the social impacts of image manipulation.
The title one most often hears attached to you is the “Princess of Photoshop.” How did you go from drawing as a child to having your name and art intertwined with this modern art medium?
Since I was a child, art has always captured my imagination, with the only difference being perhaps that back then, it was not art, but play. From the outset, I was busy sculpting or sometimes sewing clothes for my Barbies. Bead weaving and things like that. Any creative activity that a child could engage in. Then I started primary school, and we had a drawing teacher, Mary, who obsessed with the idea of nurturing young talent. She noticed my interests, and I started drawing on a more serious level. I went to lots of drawing classes, and she sometimes took me out of my other classes so that I could prepare, with her help, for drawing competitions.
When I was seven, we won an international drawing competition, which was quite a big deal at the time. Then I won another one, and then came the national drawing competitions. This seemed like a kind of predestination for me, because success felt so good, as did the fact that I was able to do it all with my own two hands. It enthralled me, and it felt so good to draw. It was a completely different experience for me than getting highest marks on a text in a literature class.
I was ten or eleven years old when my sister, who is ten years older than I am, was doing designs in Photoshop, and I asked her to give it to me, and in the summer break I got a computer from my dad at my grandmother’s place. She was also someone with a gift for nurturing talent, and she made sure we had anything we might need for creative self-expression. And so then I spent the whole summer break using Photoshop to play with ten or eleven pictures that I had saved to a CD. This was all very exciting for me at the gentle age of eleven. I did not speak English, I knew nothing about the software, but I realized that you could transform images, and this only later became intertwined with drawing and the visual arts. At first, computer graphics and graphics done by hand were completely separate for me.
I started making webpages. I had a GPORTAL line, and I made webpages for my classmates. I did this until I turned 15, and then I became a little “emo,” and I started using Photoshop to edit emo images. I realized that on MyVip, which was a social media portal at the time, one could make quite a splash with this kind of thing, and several thousand people had looked at my emo images. As a teenager, I became a real emo star! (laughs) What remained of that later was that I used Photoshop to edit my photos and I took pictures of myself.
Then came an unfortunate period when I was diagnosed with a tumor. Fortunately, it was benign, so I didn’t have to fear for my life. By the time I ended up at the doctor’s, however, with my 15-year-old head I had already resolved to throw the dice: I knew that this was what I wanted to do, and I wanted to be like the great photographers. Whatever happened, I wanted to be a cool photographer and leave behind a legacy of pictures. I had been accepted to a secondary school at the time for a drawing program, and I realized that I couldn’t draw very well. My classmates could draw anything they laid eyes on, but I could not. If my classmates drew a picture that could be made using three colors, they used three colors, whereas I used twelve which they couldn’t even see.
That was when I realized that, since I can’t draw very well and I had this fear of passing away, I should take pictures of myself and do all kinds of surreal things too. And that was when I gave up drawing and started concentrating on photography. My father was a good partner for me in that. I feared that I would never be able to master the art of photography because the technical side seemed so complicated. When my father explained how the camera works, what the shutter speed is, and how to sync it with the flash, then suddenly it didn’t seem quite so inscrutable. I took lots of photographs of myself, but they never turned out the way I wanted them to. I realized I had to learn this craft. That was when the real photographer part of my career began, and then came Photoshop.
That was given to me by others. I only use it because there’s an English girl who simply copied my identity a few years ago. To this day, if I take a picture, she does a similar one. She’s the reason why I started calling myself the princess of Photoshop, to make clear that I am the princess, not her. (laughs)
That’s fate for you! You are forced to accept a responsibility that you never wanted!
Yes, and I realized that if I post the images on my Instagram page, she can’t post her lookalikes. It’s a bit childish. Maybe someday the history books will write about this rivalry, like the rivalry between Renoir and Monet.
The full interview can be read on The Continental Literary Magazine.
