DYSTOPIAN ROMANTICISM™: THE ARTIST MANIFESTO By Tunde Valiszka

“In every puddle, a portal. In every shadow, a story.”

I. A NEW VISUAL LANGUAGE

Dystopian Romanticism™ is a contemporary visual framework that explores the emotional and psychological reality of urban existence through a cinematic and philosophically grounded photographic language. Emerging from the tension between technological hyper-stimulation and human fragility, this genre positions the modern city as both stage and mirror: a reflective surface for inner states of longing, isolation, resistance, and quiet transcendence.

Within this framework, the city is not approached as a documentary subject, but as an emotional terrain. Illuminated streets, reflections, artificial glows, and fragmented shadows reveal more than concrete and glass; they expose the silent narratives of individuals navigating environments that are at once seductive and dehumanising. Geography dissolves in favour of psychology, and the urban night becomes a metaphor for the contemporary soul.

II. A WORLD IN REFLECTION

Central to Dystopian Romanticism™ is the understanding that dystopia is not a speculative tomorrow, but a lived present. Identity fragmentation, the erosion of intimacy, the omnipresent surveillance gaze and the commodification of existence form the emotional architecture of late-capitalist megacities. Within this fractured landscape, the imagery seeks moments of gentle defiance: the persistence of human presence, beauty and vulnerability inside systems engineered to flatten individuality and emotional nuance.

Conceptually, the genre operates within a layered psychological and socio-philosophical terrain. Drawing from Carl Jung, the city becomes a projection field for the collective unconscious, where the Shadow, the disowned and suppressed aspects of the self, materialises through architecture, light and absence. The nocturnal journey itself echoes the process of individuation: a solitary traversal through fragmentation in pursuit of psychic integration and wholeness.

Simultaneously, the visual environment reflects the theoretical echoes of Jean Baudrillard, in which urban space functions as hyperreality, a simulated landscape of signs divorced from authentic experience, and Michel Foucault’s discourse on surveillance culture, where power operates not through visible force, but through internalised self-regulation. In this liminal zone, imagery inhabits the threshold between psyche and system, intimacy and control, presence and disappearance.

Dystopian Romanticism™ by Tunde Valiszka

Dystopian Romanticism™ by Tunde Valiszka

Dystopian Romanticism™ by Tunde Valiszka

III. AESTHETIC DNA

Visually, the language draws from the atmospheric futurism of Blade Runner, the melancholic lyricism of Wong Kar-wai, and the existential solitude of Edward Hopper. High contrast, hyper-saturated palettes and exclusively available light transform ordinary nocturnal scenes into symbolic, introspective compositions. Shot entirely handheld, the work embraces imperfection as an essential component of emotional truth, preserving immediacy, vulnerability and human tension within the image.

Dystopian Romanticism™  by Tunde Valiszka

Each photograph functions as a psychological cityscape rather than a landscape record. When the human figure appears, it exists not as spectacle but as witness: fragile, luminous, suspended within architectural vastness and emotional silence. These figures do not perform; they endure.

Dystopian Romanticism™ ultimately exists as an inquiry into emotional survival within environments engineered to overwhelm, distract and anesthetise. It constructs spaces where silence regains authority, where beauty emerges from rupture, and where viewers are invited not only to observe the city, but to confront their own internal states within it. In this sense, the work does not simply depict urban reality, it reveals the emotional truth embedded in its architecture.

Rather than documenting what the city looks like, it visualises what the city feels like.