This was taken in the summer of 2015 at Lake Balaton in Hungary, and the woman in the photo is my friend Kati. We had just turned 30 and were happy to be single, to not have children and to be free. There was something about that summer for me that had this power. We weren’t questioning our femininity, we weren’t questioning our bodies any more. Kati and Nati are two of my closest friends and we spent that whole summer together, going to the beach, swimming and taking photos. All that mattered to us back then was finding someone we could fall in love with.
Balaton is the biggest lake in Hungary, the biggest in central Europe, in fact. For us Hungarians, it represents the summer. As kids, you’d finish school in June and then until September you’d be at your grandma’s house at the lake. You’d bike around, sit in the garden, read books. They were just these endless post-communist summers with German tourists and Hungarian schoolkids.
