The Storm | Balazs Gardi

The leader of the free world looked on as his followers surged towards the point where the certification of the election he had lost was underway. The thud of stun grenades grew louder as Gardi followed them up the National Mall, past the wooden gallows they had erected. At the barricades, a man in a cowboy hat lifted his jacket to show Gardi a revolver tucked into his waistband. Beyond him, a mob engaged in vicious hand-to-hand combat with outnumbered police. Gardi, navigating his way through the fumes of caustic chemicals, jets of pepper spray and the occasional barrage of rubber bullets, wondered how this outburst would alter the founding principles of the country he had recently started to call home.

In Gardi’s words, ‘The use of demagoguery, intimidation and fearmongering by self-serving politicians is not new. As a young photographer in Hungary, I witnessed how malicious propaganda helped morph a freshly liberated Soviet client state into a kleptocracy, hiding under the crumbling facade of a Western democracy.’

Gardi warns us how easily a privileged society can slide into an Orwellian dystopia.

Four years ago, at Freedom Plaza in downtown Washington, D.C., he listened to a young man deliver a proudly fascist speech, unaware that below his feet lay buried a time capsule filled with files honouring the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. In 2025, Donald Trump was sworn into office on the day the country commemorates King. During his address, Trump hailed his inauguration as ‘Liberation Day’. One of his first acts as President was to pardon or rearol everyone who had attacked the Capitol four years earlier.

Gardi gathered these photographs to alert future viewers to the prospect that what he witnessed can happen anywhere.

As he says, ‘The storm is here.’