He is an experimental photographer and visual artist, who he has been engaged with alternative art endeavours since the 1980s, and has also played an active role in the use of photography in the visual arts. In 1987, the Studio of Young Photographers organised an exhibition entitled Self- Portraits – VARNAGY’s photo, of which there is only one, was made for this occasion. “My starting point was that if I took a picture of myself, either in a mirror or from a tripod, I would inevitably strike a pose. That is, I would show something of myself as I would like to see myself. At the same time, the self-portraits I have seen so far have also shown me that a self-portrait is not necessarily just a portrait, but also, for example, the environment I have created for myself, the place where I live. So I had the idea to try to take a picture of myself by throwing the camera in the air in my own apartment, and then I’d see what happens. I mean, some of the pictures would obviously be of the room, some of them of me, some of them of my face, some of them of my shirt, my hands, anything that, taken together, might paint a self-portrait of me that might be more telling and more ‘objective’ than my own idea of myself. The camera I threw in the air was a 6×6 film camera. The two 12-frame sequence, with all the errors, became a true self-portrait.”