An Absurd Request With a Memory Attached
There’s a photograph of Willem Dafoe with a house on his head that’s been added to the pantheon of portraits of the iconic actor.
The structure is small, pitched-roofed, plain enough to be drawn by a kid and cut from cardboard ten minutes later. Dafoe’s face peeks out through a cut-out doorway. This is a face that has spent decades reflecting menace, sainthood, exhaustion, a little green goblin mischief, and everything in between. Here, he looks like a kid who’s been sent to his room and decided to get one up on his parents by enjoying his punishment.
The photograph was taken by Szilveszter Makó for GQ Italia’s 2023 Man of the Year feature. Now, under ordinary circumstances, the negotiation would have been the more familiar formula of formal suit, lots of strobes, recognizable actor, and boom, a useful portrait. Makó handed him a house. The request is a bit absurd, but that absurdity is frequent in Makó’s work and has a history. Years earlier, Makó found a photograph of himself in kindergarten wearing a cardboard house on his own head. That image survived his childhood, geography, fashion professional ambition, and all the debris that can bury a small memory like that. Then one day, it returns, resized for some of the most recognized faces in the world.
This is one of the stranger privileges of being an artist. Inspiration can enter your life before you have any idea what to do with it. It may spend years without a purpose, lodged somewhere below conscious intention, until the right face, commission, object, or accident gives it another life.
Nobody Is Born With an Eye
We prefer the convenient story that certain people arrive on earth already equipped with vision. They have “the eye” as if it were a kekkei genkai inherited because of special DNA. We laud them. And we love it because it flatters us artists, but we also love it because it gives us an excuse for accepting the most sterile of offerings.
Makó’s work offers a less romantic account and at the same time, a more useful one. No, you’re not born with an eye, but you can build one. Places contribute to a piece. Memories contribute to another. Discipline of craft tightens the joints. Your fixations stain the entire thing. Throw in a dash of serendipity. And just like that, years later, you’d have produced enough with a distinguished point of view that people will assume you were born with.
He grew up in Miskolc, an industrial city in northeastern Hungary shaped by factories, coal dust, bare brick, and the severity of the post-communist years. Makó has credited the city with giving him structure. In photographs, such an inheritance isn’t obvious, but it survives in habits: the subject held within a strict frame, an object denied the luxury of drifting carelessly, the sets in which every inch appears to have been assigned a task to carry out to completion.
Then there was Lillafüred, where he spent part of his early years near the forest and attended an unconventional school that treated art, craft, Ancient Greek, and Latin as neighboring forms of knowledge with equal weight. It’s difficult to imagine a more useful apprenticeship for a future photographer. You have the factory town at his back, the forest ahead of him, and old myths passing between the two. Miskolc gives him the frame; Lillafüred teaches him that the frame can contain all sorts of enchanting ideas.
You can feel both places in his work given this precontext. He wraps bodies in structures that make them look architectural. Subjects' hand and arm placements are precise, and at sharp angles. Then, somewhere within that control, we see a cardboard fish being used as a surfboard. We see a head become a house and a family table extended by Monica Bellucci’s anatomy.
Natural Light, Handmade Props, and a Private Grammar
Mako’s entrance into photography carries its own small improbability.
Before he was old enough to drink legally, he was cutting and dyeing the emo hairstyles of the mid-2000s in his mom’s salon. That money helped pay for his first camera. At first, the camera served the haircuts. Then the tool purchased to document one kind of transformation became the instrument of another.
Years later, he moves to Milan, in part because of his love for the Italian Renaissance. You’d think that decision made sense if you looked at his work. Makó works almost entirely with natural light, allowing it to fall across faces and his sets with the patience of paint. The illumination rarely feels incidental. It’s almost as if it’s alive and searching the set, finding the bend in cardboard, the dry edge of paper, the geometry of a cheek and brow.
Around that light, Makó has built a private grammar of references like an Omnitrix of art history he can activate according to the subject or assignment. Dada for the misplaced object. Bauhaus for the box, the plane, the disciplined angle. Surrealism loosens the agreement between body and world. Then you have Renaissance reliably entering through the window and settling over everything else. These influences are visible without oversaturating his originality. They’ve been absorbed, misremembered, and recombined. A Makó editorial can feel like a painting smuggled out of the Louvre after hours because it was folded into the pages of EE72.
Objects Are Free to Become Unstable Again
Much of what appears in his frames are made by hand. Cardboard, paper, recycled things, whatever can be cut, bent, taped, painted, or persuaded into another identity. Makó has described waste as an enemy of creation, and his sets often carry the evidence of that belief.
The materials don’t disguise their ordinary lives. If a cardboard object enters the studio carrying traces of packaging, storage, or previous use, it still has it. It’s just that under the right light, and paired with the right co-star, it's transformed into something more strange or more whimsical. That tension gives his photographs their charge. The props you see are both ancient and temporary, like a relic or a discovered rune assembled that morning.
With so much attention placed on his sets, the celebrity often appears less as the point of the photograph than another material to immortalize the narrative. Cate Blanchett becomes a wrapped form. Zlatan is a castaway on a rock. Bad Bunny is as if he’s a construction paper cutout. Dafoe wears a memory that belonged to the photographer before it belonged to him.
And the sophisticated thing is Makó doesn’t flatten the subject into a symbol; he allows the body, prop, wardrobe, and composition to interfere with one another until a more unstable identity comes to life. And that’s rare. Much of our contemporary image-making is organized around instant legibility. We’re demanded to declare the point as loud as we can before the thumb scrolls up. You have 10 seconds, tell us the joke!
Makó slows that exchange all the way down and grants objects a second life beyond their instant definitions in the way children do. Kids understand this instinctively. Before objects are disciplined by language, a box can become a kingdom without ceasing to be a box. A sheet can be a ghost, a roof, or a cape. Makó’s photographs recover some of that earlier instability, when the world had not yet forced us to keep it as itself.
Taste Is Built From What You Refuse to Forget
The sources of Makó’s visual language can be named, sure, but they can’t be separated cleanly.
Coal dust, salon dye, forest paths, schoolroom Latin, the discipline of his grandparents, Renaissance light, each enters the work carrying traces of the others. Miskolc doesn’t just sit beside Lillafüred as one influence among several. The city sharpens the forest; the forest unsettles the city. The salon introduces transformation through surface changes. The old languages introduce worlds that survive through incredibly rich fragments.
What we call taste may be less a collection of preferences than a record of sustained attention. Something catches in the mind and refuses to be evicted. Years pass. The object remains. And when we return to it, we’ve given it meanings the kid who first encountered it couldn’t have supplied.
That’s how an eye is formed, not above a life, but within one.
The world forms the photographer; the photographer, years later, returns the world back to us in another shape.
That process isn’t exclusive to photographers; it’s in all of us. Every creative life contains its own neglected archive. The places we wanted to leave. The rooms we preferred to be lost in. The objects we dismissed as we became adults. The embarrassments, fixations, the indulgences, private mythologies, most of it we treat as useless until it isn’t.
The Dafoe portrait is still kind of funny because, at the end of the day, it’s a photograph of a man with a house on his head.
But it’s moving because behind the famous actor stands the memory of a child in kindergarten wearing another version of the same cardboard roof. It carries childhood imagination into the studio and places it, lightly, over someone else’s head.
Maybe the magical eye is not simply a way of looking outward.
Maybe it’s the route by which the world that formed us continues to appear, altered, disguised, and sometimes wearing the face of Willem Dafoe.
Szilveszter Makó is a photographer and art director based in Milan. His work has appeared in Vogue, W, GQ Italia, and The Cut, and in campaigns for Prada, Jil Sander, Bottega Veneta, and others. All photographs in this piece are credited as his work.
