Eva Szombat’s colourful exploration of womanhood in Hungary

Eva Szombat was 29 years old when she bought her first sex toy.

It was 2016, and the Hungarian photographer was in a committed relationship with her now-husband. She finally worked up the courage to walk into a sex shop in Budapest, where she picked up a hot pink vibrator.

When she got home, she set it down on the toilet seat in her bathroom, which had a seat cover featuring a palm tree on a tropical island, and thought, “Wow, this looks amazing!”

“I thought, I want a picture of this, it’s so much fun!” Szombat tells Euronews Culture. “I was really shy and wasn’t so comfortable with my body, my sexuality, these kinds of things. But at that time, something changed.”

She decided to post the picture on her Instagram, just to see what would happen.

Little did she know that post was going to be a launching pad for her award-winning photo project and book, “I want orgasms, not roses.”

‘Bored of the shame’

The year after she bought that first vibrator, Szombat put out a call on social media, asking for volunteers to let her photograph them with their sex toys.

She was surprised by how many people responded, and even more so by the fact that they were almost exclusively women. Over the next five years, she photographed and interviewed dozens of women of all ages for the project, with diverse backgrounds and sexual orientations.

“It became a girls’ project,” she says. “I was really happy about this because I thought that female sexuality is really repressed. We’re told to be so humble and nice and pretty and everybody says that if you’re really horny or if you like sex, you are a whore.”

Gender stereotypes are particularly pervasive in Hungary, where the staunchly anti-abortion ruling FIDESZ party has defined childbirth as a woman’s sacred duty, rejected same-sex marriage and rolled back trans rights and gender equality.

It didn’t take long for Szombat to realise that her project was about much more than just some colourful plastic toys. During the interviews she conducted with her subjects, she uncovered deep shame they felt with regards to their sexuality.

“Initially I thought it was going to be a fun project,” she says. “You know, ‘Show me your sex toys!’ Because sex toys are fun! It looks cool, it’s something you use to enjoy yourself. But then I realised this topic is much larger because there is a lot of trauma and shame in it.”

Many times she found herself crying when she listened back to the interviews, like when one woman detailed the abuse she suffered as a child and how it made her see her sexuality as something filthy and dangerous, something to be ashamed of.

“When I asked her why she applied to the project, she said to me that she got bored of the shame,” Szombat says. “That was my favourite sentence in the book: ‘I got bored of the shame.’ I think this is the core of the project, this shame. And to show how you can be more happy with your sexuality and yourself.”

A diverse world that’s full of colour

Despite the heavy subject matter, Szombat’s photographs overflow with joy, brimming with pastel colours and irreverent details that reflect her own bubbly personality and sense of humour. Her laugh is infectious, punctuating her sentences as she describes her work.

“These women are not sad and miserable,” she insists. “Okay, many of them have a lot of trauma. But they did something to change their lives, or they are on the road to changing their lives. They are okay with themselves, or they’re trying to be okay with themselves. And I wanted to show that, and the happy part of it.”

Szombat says she developed her “photographic language” years ago, a style she’s honed through a series of projects examining happiness and mental well-being.

“I want orgasms, not roses” is a continuation of that work, showing the journey many women take to reach sexual pleasure and well-being.

She uses clever visual metaphors to tell some of the women’s personal stories. One photo shows a headless doll sitting across the table from a giant dildo, in a dollhouse belonging to one of her subjects. It represents the abusive relationship the woman left, after which she became a dominatrix.

“Somehow this represented her previous life, but in a fun way because there’s a happy ending.”

The colours Szombat uses in the photos are also often laden with meaning – like in one photograph of a hand glistening with lube, belonging to a woman who identifies as asexual and aromantic.

“The colours are the colours of the asexual and aromantic flags,” Szombat says. “You know, sexuality is really colourful, it’s a spectrum. It’s not just the heterosexual point of view, there’s a transsexual girl, a bisexual girl. I tried to make it more colourful.”

Memory book for a new generation

While working on the series, Szombat had a serendipitous moment after she discovered her grandmother’s memory book from when she was a girl.

Memory books are a centuries-old tradition in Hungary, a sort of yearbook for schoolchildren that are filled with handwritten messages from friends, family and teachers. The messages include inspirational quotes, jokes and advice for the future, among other things.

Her grandmother’s memory book had notes from friends including: 

“God made you a woman

You can only become of value

If you learn to resign,


Suffer and tolerate in life.”

or

“Do not wish to be happy in life,

After thorns it is better to rest on roses.”

“When I found these sentences in my grandma’s memory book, I realised maybe that’s why it’s so hard for women to express themselves or say out loud what their needs are,” she says. “Because they told us that we have to be humble and bear the pain.”

For her photo book, published by Kehrer Verlag in collaboration with Everybody Needs Art / Longtermhandstand, Szombat wanted to maintain aspects of a traditional memory book.

She worked with graphic designer Anna Bárdy to add details like curly font that resembles girls’ handwriting, or doodles at the back of the book that friends would traditionally draw.

She even included quotes that came directly from her grandmother’s memory book. Like one little poem that reads, “Roses are red, violets are blue, modesty makes you a woman of virtue.”

Alongside it is a photo Szombat made of a bondage ball gag sitting in a bed of violets.

“It’s kind of a new memory book,” she says.

Szombat has received a lot of support and recognition for this project, which was awarded Hungary’s prestigious Robert Capa Grand Prize in 2021. In 2023, the book was a joint winner at Belfast Photo Festival Photo-Book Award.

However, the divisive subject matter has also led to some backlash in Hungary.

As the government increasingly tightens its controls on speech and media, reports say some artists are being forced to self-censor, especially when it comes to LGBTQ+ content.

But Szombat says she sees it as an invitation to create more work that challenges the dominant viewpoint.

“Sometimes I feel like I have to go somewhere else, that I have to leave this country because it’s terrible what’s happening here. Other times I feel like I have to do my stuff here, because they need some fun,” she says with a laugh.

Eva Szombat’s photo project “I want orgasms, not roses” will be featured in the group show “Shades of Her” at Punctum Gallery in Tallinn from 15 February. Her other projects can also be viewed at Krinzinger Schottenfeldin Vienna andLongtermhandstandin Budapest.