Magyar’s life of travel honed his skills as an observer and reinforced his sense of being an outsider. At one level he seemed in constant motion. At another level he was capable of remaining still for long periods simply watching the flow of life. He once spent six months studying the movement of the river in Varanasi, the ancient Hindu capital on the Ganges. During that trip, he asked Zazi to bring him a book on introductory photography that he had won as a prize years before in elementary school. “I was almost 30,” he said. “And I started learning about apertures and light and developing my stuff in a darkroom. I loved it.” A year later, he documented daily life at a private school in Darjeeling, a Himalayan hill station in northeastern India, and his series of black-and-white photos won first prize in the annual Hungarian Press Photography competition. “He never worked too fast,” Zazi remembers. “If he found a person or a place intriguing he’d stand around for hours.”