Bogdan Andrei Bordeianu
Bogdan Andrei Bordeianu is a photographer born in Bucharest, Romania, currently living in Haarlem, The Netherlands. His interest for art and photography as a medium began in high school and subsequently he applied to UNARTE’s photography and video department courses since 2002, where he received the BFA in 2006 and a MA in 2008.
His Bachelor’s diploma project, Perifeeric I, was selected by Startpoint (CZ) Gallery Klatovy Klenova, at the time a major European exhibition consiting in selected works of Europe art schools graduates. The continuation of the above mentioned project, named Perifeeric II was the subject for his master’s.
Other works he made were selected by the Musee de l’Elisee Lausanne to be included in their reGeneration2 – Tomorrow’s Photographers Today project, an international selection of the 80 most interesting photographers and recent graduates from photography departments.
His focus mainly skews towards landscape. The Perifeeric I and II (Peryfairy I&II) projects focused on the rapid, almost unregulated and chaotic expansion of Bucharest into the surrounding agricultural lands, generated by a big increase in population density and a decrease of the quality of life inside the city. A bit later, the subject matter of landscape increased both in approach and geographically as he participated in the RoArchive project, diversified by introducing the decline of the industries, the appearance of new wild and immature businesses, the tasteless, careless grandeur of the newly built churches and all the present construction sites.
The shared similarities between (industrial) ruins and construction sites, land inbetween stages of the building process led to the growth of his interest towards a more universal topic of landship. Every new building process (including reconstruction and preservation works) implies a destruction of what was there before, either the demolition of an old building or the apparently simple digging of a whole for a foundation, and it always has a much larger footprint than the end product.
Temporary Landscapes, is more focused on medium to large scale sites part of unfolding construction processes. The images act partly as a document whenever there’s included date information in the frame, but also in essential form display the transformation of the land. Another aspect is the ready-made land art quality that Bordeianu adds into discussion alongside the temporary condition of the subject.
Find Bogdan Andrei Bordeianu here:
https://bogdanbordeianu.ro/
https://www.instagram.com/bogdanandreibordeianu
Temporary Landscapes
I had taken a few images a particular tipe of place which I observed in a “new light”, I wasn’t sure about their nature, not for that matter the “new light”’s nature, but I was definitely intrigued.
It wasn’t something unfamiliar, as I had photographed before in a documentary style (approach) roads, active construction sites, ruin-like construction sites once frozen and later in a degradation state, new housing developments (the exodus of people living in Bucharest towards the periphery), industrial sites etc.
It didn’t take long to come up with a title (a working tittle I thought at the time), I just grabbed it from the cloud of ideas, the one where all our ideas come from. It was a direct description of what I saw – landscapes in a provisional state, which remained the final title too since I came to the conclusion that all landscapes are transitory, one just needs to play a tiny bit with the scale of time.
Little did I know it will bring me into researching the actual notion of landscape, althoug at the time my main concern in understanding the environment was the transformation of landscape, seen as an indicator of society’s stage. Denis E. Cosgrove points out that “We cannot know nature outside the historical circumstances in which we find ourselves” (Landscape Theory seminar).
I was following the New Topographics approach, (an exhibition that revived the interest for this once minor art subject) with a non-judgmental view on whether shaping the landscape is bad or good. I had set myself as an observer of this acion, phenomenon, ideea called landscape. The word landscape use to be landship, a partnership with mutual shaping (of people and place) and I see this as an unfolding process of society writing its autobiography; it was only later, probably in thew 1900’s, that it became landscape and, by the sound of it, also implying a shift in the power play between people and place.
The size, the aesthetic qualities of shapes, structures, their colors and the artificial (man made) qualities of these places struck me as almost land-art works without an author or in search of one (I am paraphrasing Pirandello). Furthermore, when thinking about photography the ready-made aspect is probably one of its most prominent intrinsic qualities, and thus I regard this places as a sort of Ready-Made-Land-Art.
Photographing and trying to control the aesthetic qualities of these places and of my photographs, I felt somehow uncomfortable and I had an inner ethical conflict of sorts as I felt as almost loosing the non-judgemental, distant approach. However, i had found what Reyner Banham said in „Landscape and the West – Irony and Critique in New Topographic Photography“ as a valid and a suitable statement for my project too: the “irony is that this beauty is itself a product of careless human ambition”.