Circa (post) 2000
See What. Photography in Romania after 2000
The advent of the 35 mm small format and the first Leica cameras coincided with the moment when photography descended from the tripod, gaining new mobility and unexpected power of coverage. In his 1977 essay Speed and Politics, Paul Virilio introduces the concept of dromology, arguing that societies’ evolution is centered on speed; the new photographic rhythms yielded the first results in the direction we are now familiar with. Along with the medium’s democratization and the technological boom of the 60s and 70s, photography became a social custom, a change which did not, however, have a reflection in Romanian reality. In Romania, people would not take photos. The gesture of taking a photograph implied too much freedom for a regime that was used to set bounds to it. Ion Grigorescu’s Electoral Meeting series of 1974 evokes Walker Evans’s Subway Passengers (1938-1941), a series of pictures taken in the New York subway, with a camera hidden his coat sleeve. There is, however, a fundamental difference here: if Evans was ever caught taking pictures, nothing would have happened to him, whereas in Grigorescu’s case, consequences would have been dire. The romanticism of Robert Capa’s famous dictum “if your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough” was reversed in Romania: one could only take pictures from afar or within the hermetic intimacy of personal apartments and micro-realities; always taking a spatial and mental distance, always with fear. The medium’s liberalization occurred after ’89, “everyone (finally) became an artist”, and photography was no longer only about the final product, but an event per se. This is the beginning of the temporal arc we are interested in, the moment of intersection that is the subject of this statement-exhibition. We’re talking about a new context, where anyone who wished to take photos was free to do so, without restrictions or repercussions. The time of neo-freedom and new behavioural algorithms; this is the background of the artists selected in the “See What” exhibition.
Our focus encompasses a segment of the very recent history which could be equated to immediate contemporaneity. The exhibition proposes a museum display completely novel for Romania, considering that, inexplicably, there has been no effort toward a comprehensive retrospective on contemporary Romanian photography in the way of a close historical reflection. This selection explores the photographic projects and production of the latest twenty years; a chronology and an assemblage of works that inherently trace the big picture. The core names proposed here can be summed up with a new (or all-too-underutilized) expression: The Post-2000 Generation. A momentum like what would, in other fields, be called “a new wave”. In the case of Romanian photography, while the wave may break into multiple directions, all of them get to reach the same shore. The artists whose works are displayed here started taking photographs in a social climate where “everything is permitted, accepted, and encouraged”, and it is precisely this freedom which engendered the diversity of exploration we see now. While in some instances we may recognize a certain exactness, in others, the post-photographic and experimental aspects rule and dictate the rhythm.
In the digital age, the fear to take photos is gone. Alternatively, we have the fear of being photographed. The omnipresence of cameras reflects the ironic upheaval of old paradigms: there are too many photos being taken now, anyone can take photos in any way; and the photographic medium reasserts its position as an instrument of power on a larger scale. While painting is always interpretation, photography is always transparency, and that can often be a problem. Photographers extract and include details floating in our accessible collective memory. They invite us to contemplate, again and again, what we already know; but they ask us to do it differently: in other temporalities, but through the same eyes. Photography emerges from the collision between STM and LTM (short term memory/long term memory), removing any possible doubt and confirming that, at a given time, certain things existed exactly as in the image that captured them that way, forever. Today, the concept of forever is niched around technological reality. The only immortality I can empathize with is that of mechanical reproducibility, theorized by Walter Benjamin. In the past, forever depended upon a series of factors, such as conservation and preservation of an original – for example, the negative of an image –, on the dissemination level of that image in various contexts, like books, albums, articles etc. The rise of the online and of virtual storage methods (clouds, blogs, drives) provided an enormous volume of visual material with a new perspective for immortality. In a society oversaturated with images, brought to the edge between hoarding, visual bulimia, and in sheer contrast with the idea of aura, those who sought eternal life have found it, often without realizing it. If we are to live forever in the memory of others and through their remembrance, the online world understood as the biggest and most complex self-generated archive will be able to offer visual reference for every one of us through a mechanism which, involuntarily, gets to function like a time capsule launched toward the future without fear of decay. In the online archive, the photographic image dominates, by becoming the artifact required to come into contact with the traces of our past existence, it turns into the main reference for future archaeology. Considering that it takes 450 years for a plastic bottle to decompose, we can confidently say that the servers containing (with or without our consent) information related to us are virtually forever. Photography is a continuous education in the acceptance of the fact that everything is in the past tense.
Otherwise, hypothetically speaking, a camera that could take pictures of the future would have no appeal; it would simply make the unknown known, rendering mystery banal and stripping it of any form of tension. And tension is what makes things work, like the springs that set a mechanical timepiece into motion. We are not showcasing an anthology, but rather the idea for an update; a necessary noise that sometimes rings out in a moment of silence. A noise that attracts attention, making us look here, now, without fear. The exhibition was conceived as a display that invites without coercion. A selection “left there” consciously, but not abandoned, an exhibition open to being found and explored. The works outline the course not only of a generational moment related to contemporary Romanian photography, but also a wider setting, where local projects are framed in the context of international practices. What we have here before us is more of a witness-exhibition than a concept-exhibition. It is a highlight that can lead us to a new synthesis. In this case, the decisive instant, so ephemeral and exulted in photography, be-comes a dilated fraction of a decisive moment, one that will sprawl over three months, awaiting consumption. The “See What” participants’ continuity of work and experiments, of intellectual exploration concentrically related to photography become a mapping of the last two decades. On the two floors of MARe, no simulacrum is formed, no cosmeticizing attempted. The exhibited works are tied along the guiding thread of collective memory, shaping solutions that prove decisive in coming to recognize a state of affairs, a time and site-specific reality. The heritage of previous generations is consistently processed, resulting in a discourse that reconsiders classical (and almost inevitable) themes in a way that can define each artist’s specificity of discourse. Those who fall under this generational label work without fear; in exploring social topics, commentaries are more often than not thinly veiled, they are hidden in plain sight, and never too obvious. The exhibition is the X-ray of a moment that has successfully progressed past the infancy stage of an interactive situation, where the invitation to look on becomes the sole condition for participation. The works that populate MARe originate in Romania’s long transition period that officially commenced at the beginning of the 90s. The contemporary photography approaches may seem soft, may seem detached from the predecessors’ manifesto-photography, from photography as reaction, where the socio-political charge was explicit and often accompanied by fine conceptualization.
But let us not be fooled; all these elements are present in the exhibited photographs, but in forms different from those we have been accustomed to take as reference. The often labyrinthine walls of the museum meet works that are in a particularly interesting state of transit, in my opinion. This is the stage preceding the historical pedestal some of the exhibited artists will be placed on in the future. A stage where those transitioning from ‘young’ to ‘still young’ start a dialogue with the ‘young’ and ‘very young’. In some cases, such as Andrei Nacu’s, the same vibration takes shape in different forms and media. While archival photography inflames the hidden nooks of collective memory in the Encircled by the Motherland photo-installation, in This Side of the Looking Glass, the archive images come from the artist’s private and intimate environment. A 35 mm unexposed frame from a film strip Nacu’s father and grandfather used in the 80s. The abstraction resulting from scanning that latent frame becomes a memory case, both touching like a clear starry sky, and fragmented and remote, as the mechanisms of memory can often be. The 10/1 series which has become referential in Bogdan Gîrbovan’s work, advances a different kind of scanning. Gîrbovan’s use of photography to create an insectarium, one that includes himself, is a commentary rooted deeply in Eastern-European consciousness. Ten frames, a set of squares, a perfect form. A series where documentary meaning coexists with conceptual underpinnings which reveal themselves in a deeply photographic way.
What sets Gîrbovan apart from purely documentary photography, in the sense of reportage, is the way he chooses to capture the 10 apartments: the camera is in exactly the same position each time, thus creating the serial power of the set. Irrespective of what happens in the frame, the camera records the same perimeter from the same point. There we have the first conceptual moment. I have always felt that the second moment of this series is when the photographer himself becomes the subject. The moment of role-reversal, when the artist comes to be a part of his work in a more complex way. The moment the 10th floor photo is taken, the photo featuring Bogdan and the one which closes (or opens?) the series, allows me to bring up another relevant aspect in this discussion. After Bogdan prepared the scene, and himself, for the photo, I was the one who set off the camera. Thus, we can talk about a more complex relationship, where a (small) community of artists was often present the moments certain crucial works were created. From time to time, I think about that moment and I feel proud (I don’t know whether that’s the right word for it) that I was there, that I got a different view of what so many see now.
Artists such as Mihai Șovăială and Anton Roland Laub come with precise and seemingly emotionally detached images. Laub, in his Mobile Churches series, retells the phenomenon of churches being transplanted by the communist regime. He does this in a series/installation of images, both exacting and incisive, as if made with a historical scalpel. Similarly, Șovăială brings forth images stemming from the confluence of the industrial and the industrialized, both in the sense of past realities, and present, still unfolding ones, and, implicitly, those of the future. Șovăială’s attempts often materialize in solutions which assemble photographs into object-installations, made up of the specific materials of the photographed subjects. For example, in The Neighbours Thought It was a Science Lab, the images of apartment buildings are printed on styrofoam boards of the same kind used to insulate such buildings.
In this exhibition, Șovăială showcases a photo-installation imposing while rather hidden. The photo-wallpaper the installation is made of supports the monochrome pictures of construction sites. A conglomeration of images capable of generating rhythm and dynamism out of a static context. We can see shared interests, with different solutions brought to the same issues, like in One and Three Chairs by Joseph Kosuth, where a chair is shown as an object, as a dictionary text description, and as a photograph. Three clearly defined and separate dimensions. Except I’ve come to consider a fourth dimension that often goes unnoticed: in Kosuth’s work, photography is actually used twice, since we have to also account for the full picture, the one that contains the whole work; the photograph that allows us to see One and Three Chairs online or in books. In the case of a photography exhibition, I think finding that “fourth frame”, a dimension of intimate contemplation, becomes very important. The static image advances a particular temporal relationship. While a film sets, from the very beginning, a timeframe containing the depicted events, in the instance of photography, it is the viewer who decides on their own engagement, approach, and manner of relating to an image.
John Baldessari, in his 1966-1988 manifesto-piece Examining Pictures, asks (himself): “What do pictures consist of? What are they all about?”. In another manifesto-work, What is Painting, he would say: “Do you sense how all the parts of a good picture are involved with each other, not just placed side by side?”. These are directions each of us explores in our own intellectual privacy, as well as by sharing with others, as is the case with any exhibition. A longer succession of parts that engage a common mechanism, in which conceptual exploration becomes the structural binder. The way Andrei Mateescu revisits apartment buildings, turning them into pastel, mostly uniform surfaces, defines the Multilateral series. An older series, and a brave one through the way it manages to trace a primary elegant conceptual approach at a time when apartment buildings were mostly seen through the exultation of architectural brutalism. But Mateescu himself does the same: he condemns and he questions. Except that he finds a visual solution that dodges direct answers. The works in the Multilateral series manage to bridge the gap between problematizing urban space past and present, echoing Gîrbovan’s visceral and universal apartment buildings, with a view toward Laub/Șovăială’s architectural interests.
Lucian Bran’s narration in the Arrow, Flower, Fire series exists on the border between the fantastic and the real, the possible and the impossible. A discourse that engenders warm images, where the accidental is often an integral part of the constructed aesthetics. Everything breathes in this world of tableau photography, of painterly-familiar frequencies, at the confluence of family hikes and 4K National Geographic documentaries. In Bran’s work, photography has a classical note, it is “settled” in format and composition. Lucian shows us elaborate, large-format postcards that come to illustrate his conceptual intent in an atmosphere that seems to elaborate on (or anticipate) Ioana Cîrlig’s images. In Ioana’s case, the characters are clear-cut, well traced, and often very close to the camera that captured them. The human figure, often introduced in a deadpan kind of way, is fundamental to her work, alongside the landscape. The scenes Ioana Cîrlig offers us are often set against almost tender backgrounds, some of which contain hidden decline details: colorful balloons tied to what’s left of a billboard or a seasonal construction left derelict. All of them elements delivered to us in the guise of tentative and captivating recipes. Beyond the social landscapes and the semiotic elements scattered around by many of these artists, we bear witness to a necessary and coherent dialogue. Laub’s images, which seem to offer indexical and documentary certainty, counterbalance Valeriu Cătălineanu’s work. Cătălineanu would probe contrasts and mental tunnels. His images are enigmatic, monochrome, surrealistic, or rather anti-real, considering that reality is perceived in color. Valeriu seems to circumvent immediate reality as if he were covering it, generating here and there an almost (sub)aquatic vibration; scenes enveloped in a haze that blurs our vision and sometimes our judgement. Do we know what we are looking at or do we just get the impression that we can recognize something? The series of recognizable elements only appears to help, but it only confuses us further. The feeling that we will manage to take stock of the scenes as “known”, seen, is only surface-level, and this uncertainty is appealing. Often, romanticization serves becomes the Trojan horse that makes us accept what we would otherwise avoid looking at, and Cătălineanu splurges in this confusional perimeter, he plays “at home”.
The sequence of images by Patricia Morosan, from the Re/Turn series, becomes a flurry that only makes us imagine the context they originate from. The eighteen images that make up the exhibited sequence seem to nod to the intellectual elegance particular to some artistic practices of the past, but in fact they become important in a different respect, namely the separation of media. Morosan’s sequence builds a living commentary that points to the duo of still image – moving picture. Despite her works being showcased as still frames, they were extracted from an S8 film strip, from the context of “live” movement. Arresting their dynamism transposes the images into another time, the eternal photographic time, while preserving some artifacts that might point to their original context. We look at an intimate moment defined through a different kind of intimacy: a woman throwing a chair out a window. Why is she doing this? Where will that chair fall?
The two works by Emőke Kerekes function as an intermezzo capable of offering respite and enabling transit within the visual collection of the exhibition. In this case, the author’s intention points the camera once again toward landscapes. We see two playground scenes, the kind we know from public parks. Kerekes shows them to us in an unexpected light, using contrasts to the point of suggesting solarization or the transition of the image from negative to positive. Even though the subject is recognizable and can be placed instantly, Emőke’s solution for visual impact, more graphical than photographical in approach, manages to surprise, generating a vibration that questions our perception of landscapes more generally. Images that, while “loaded with black”, stay within a breezy, unoppressive sphere.
The borderline realities captured in Virginia Lupu’s images make us feel the kind of closeness that can’t be faked; we once again encounter the kind of situation previously mentioned in Gîrbovan’s case, where the artist is the subject of their own images, where they enter the frame. In this case, the limits of self-portraiture are crossed. It’s more about a contextual portrait, where the artist coexists.
This is not a world Virginia is preying upon in order to produce images that would feed her ego or fulfill the needs of a “connoisseur” public. Lupu is part of the images she exhibits, they are her life turned into photography. Boltanski said that art must imitate life, and in this case the relationship goes both ways, like in the intimate (but at the same time, public and well-known) photo-graphic diaries of Nan Goldin and Larry Clark. Regardless of its duration, an exhibition is and will always be an ephemeral moment. We could liken it to a movie, always repeating what was previously asserted. A book, on the other hand, is more akin to a photograph; it allows you to dictate the pace (and time) you dedicate to it. Thus, text also finds its meaning in the power of this book, this object/witness that seeks to go beyond the function of a catalogue. The hidden fantasy is that it will, in its turn, become a point of reference for another post-xxxx generation.
According to Vilém Flusser, images are surfaces with meaning. Some can be decoded in one glance, operating on the level of superficial understanding, others can be understood more complexly.
In order to reconstruct the abstract dimension, the eye has to be allowed to scan the surfaces. This process takes place both in the photographer’s work and from the point of view of the person looking at a picture. In fortunate cases, the two will have scanned the same image. Naturally, there can be nuances of shared empathy, but there will always be a fracture which is difficult to explain. I bring this up in order to talk about my personal position in a context where I am both the lead curator of the “See What” exhibition, and a featured artist. Without direct experience of taking photographs, a theoretician will always see photography as an exhibit. As an author, my empathy toward the works is decidedly different. I don’t know if this is a good thing or not, but I feel that the situation around the “See What” exhibition was like being invited to reassemble a ready-made. When artists act as curators, the emotional dimension of the gesture gains a new intensity, which echoes Flusser’s The Gesture of Photographing. The decision to take a retroactive look at my generational peers’ portfolios in order to select early series (like Gîrbovan’s 10/1) was not devoid of risks, but my desire was to further establish certain works which have been around and beg to be consumed, in the sense of taking a distance from them, both by their authors and by the public.
I did not look for anything novel or surprising, prefer-ring to pick what is already well known and well done. The magic of photography consists in its capacity to record subjects that exist within a multidimensional structure on a two-dimensional surface. These two-dimensional surfaces allow us to imagine infinite subjective variations which are only accessible through the contemplative approach specific to still imagery. The subject of a photograph can also be named its cause; in this sense, “See What” becomes a network of causes, some of which also come to contain their subsequent effects. Derrida saw photography as “a silent object” and I think a photography exhibition can be seen as something similar. The works are there, silent, devoid of any forced, arrogant conceptualizations. The essence of photography can be summed up in a word that describes both the reality of the person behind the camera, and the reality of the person standing in front of the work: “gaze”.
I think this also approximates my intention, more of a photographer’s than a curator’s: to encourage gazing, both at the exhibition and at this book. Photography makes it possible for us to feel included and like we belong; to feel close-ness to these fixed subjects. The images that make up this exhibition explore a ping-pong between meaning and punctum. They show us “how it was and is no more and will never be again”, offering us the memory of moments we empathize with, but we are no longer sure whether we really experienced them.
– by Michele Bressan
Text originally appeared in the “See What. Photography in Romania after 2000″ catalogue published in 2022, in the frame the eponymous exhibition held by MARe.
