The images in the My Library of Missed Opportunities series represent a turning point in Dani Ghercă’s photographic production, establishing a new way of relating to the role the photographic image can acquire in the 21st century.
Exposed directly in the darkroom at various light intensities and varied colors, these 4×5″ slides deny the ability of the photographic medium to represent and record immediate reality.
Dani Ghercă (b. 1988)
Dani Ghercă’s large-scale photographs reflect on the current transition to a new phase of human consciousness that we don’t yet fully understand. In Ghercă’s cityscapes, in a time when life is changing faster than we can comprehend due to technological disruptions, the city is no longer represented by architecture or people but is reduced to an endless flow of big-data. By underexposing his pictures and twisting the image’s perspective, he creates confusion, evoking a sense of urban and social alienation many of us experience today in a world that is changing at a super-fast pace.
Prior to his current practice (between 2010 and 2019) he worked on different projects that document the social and economic shifts that occurred as a result of the Romanian revolution and the country’s EU membership. Some of the main subjects of his earlier works include marginalized groups living in a maze of underground tunnels in Bucharest (“Tunnels and Pipes” 2011-2015) or the decay of communist working-class neighbourhoods in Romania (“A Diagram of Utopia” 2014-2017).