portraits-in-passion-student-collection

The students Czimber painted were not passionate in the motivational-poster sense. The passion here is closer to its older meaning: intensity of experience, the condition of being deeply absorbed in something. His student portraits have that quality — people caught in the act of caring about an idea, though which idea varies by face. As a collection, they make a quiet argument: that the interior lives of students are worth documenting, especially when history was doing its best to make their exterior circumstances the only thing that seemed to matter.