Felicia Simion

Copyright Felicia Simion

Bucharest-based photographer Felicia Simion features in The Royal Photographic Society’s April 2020 Journal ‘In Focus’ section (p. 228), with a photograph of a nativity-themed play (which I notice is slightly cropped) taken in Breb.  It is accompanied by a brief interview discussing her project ethnographies, charting aspects of rural Romanian folklore and customs which are gradually disappearing.

She revealed that the idea arose during her study of cultural anthropology, ethnology and folklore, when she decided she was less interested in the past than in how such customs interact with a changing culture.  The result is a fascinating insight into longstanding traditions while conveying a sense of their fragility in the face of modernity (a tension perhaps exemplified by the child wearing a Scream mask).

Simion has said in interviews elsewhere that the desire to become a photographer originated in her discovery of the Magnum agency at the age of 13.  Although still only in her mid-twenties, she has already produced a wide range of images in both colour and black and white, has gained a huge number of awards, and been widely exhibited and published.  She balances commercial work (book covers, fashion) with documentary and art photography.

As well as in Romania, where the accompanying text on her website describes with affection the village in which she grew up and her relatives living there, she has photographed in France, South America, and surprisingly on the Bluebell Line in Sussex.  Just as easily her camera can turn inwards, as when her body in pregnancy became her subject.  She is comfortable with both realism and fantasy, sometimes photographing herself in colourful body suits which render ordinary locations uncanny, but has a particular talent for portraiture, especially women’s faces.

It’s a shame the RPS could not have afforded Simion more space to showcase her versatility but the piece does include a link to her website, which should widen her audience still further.

 

Update 10 September 2022:

‘Photographer Suffering From Postpartum Depression Uses Her Camera to Find Herself Again [Interview]’

A short interview with Felicia Simion appeared on the My Modern Met website, dated 29 August 2022.  Staff editor Sara Barnes asked her about how photography had performed a healing function in her recovery from postpartum depression.  Feeling alienated from the countryside at home, she took herself off to Iceland for the project which became Rewired (2022) and featured Simion entangled in yards of woolen yarn – red, yellow and blue – a soft warm curved body contrasting with the hard cold angular, but beautiful, terrain.

Despite cutting an isolated figure, dwarfed by her surroundings, she says the act of tying herself to the bleak landscape made her feel alive.  It was a healing experience, though one might characterise it more as shock therapy, the uncomfortable act of physically linking herself to the natural world acting to refresh her relationship with it.  It may not be the sort of treatment that is for everyone, but it worked for her, and resulted in a memorable set of images.

Asked to describe her work, she replied it is ‘Eclectic. Real and surreal at the same time,’ and Rewired, the title of which says it all, accurately fulfils that description.  She mentioned at the end that her next project will concern environmental issues in a southern Romanian village, proof that she is once again at home in the countryside of her homeland after her sojourn in a place that could not be more different.

Simion talks about Rewired on her website.  She is also running a project in which she invites others who are suffering or have suffered from postpartum depression to get in touch in order to share their experiences.

https://feliciasimionphotography.com/wp/

Train to Trieste, by Domnica Radulescu

Domnica Radulescu’s 2008 Train to Trieste is an example of the genre dealing with life in communist Romania and emigrating to escape it, allowing comparisons to be made with both an insider’s and an outsider’s perspective: other examples are Herta Müller’s The Passport, Roxanne Veletzos’s The Girl They Left Behind, and Ioana Pârvulescu’s short story ‘A Voice’.  Train to Trieste charts the life of Mona Maria Manoliu as she grows up in Romania, moves to Chicago in her twenties, then in a short final section returns to Romania two decades later to seek answers to old questions – and receives a remarkable surprise.

Living in Bucharest with her parents, teenage Mona spends her holidays in the Carpathian city of Brașov with her aunt, uncle and cousins, and at the age of 17, in 1977, falls in love with the enigmatic and older Mihai, whom she sees on her visits.  He disapproves of her anti-regime sentiments, and starts wearing a leather jacket, a garment favoured by the Securitate; then she is warned by another woman to be careful of him as he has links to the secret police.  She wonders to what extent she can trust him.

Her father, a university lecturer, is part of a dissident group, which makes life increasingly difficult for him, and for Mona, as family members too are treated with suspicion.  People are having ‘accidents’ in the street, her father is arrested and beaten, then demoted, and she herself is routinely followed and has a frightening encounter with a menacing government goon.  Following her love for literature she uses the British and American libraries in Bucharest, further casting her loyalty in doubt.

In her early twenties life has become so difficult that Mona’s family decide she should leave Romania.  She escapes via Belgrade to Trieste, then on to Chicago as part of a sponsorship programme, helped by incredibly kind and selfless people along the way.  Her journey to Chicago mirrors that of Radulescu’s own in 1983, and is a similar trajectory to Veletzos, who was born in Bucharest and moved to California as a young woman.  Mona does not say goodbye to Mihai, but he had been such a significant part of her life that she is shocked to hear later that he was killed on Christmas Day 1989, shot by a random bullet in the street.

In Chicago Mona makes a life for herself, putting her Romanian past behind her.  She works hard, gets married, has children, gets divorced, takes degrees, her parents join her, she moves to Indiana to take a teaching job, Ceaușescu is overthrown, her beloved father dies.  She decides to visit Romania after a gap of twenty years, both vicariously for her father, who never really took to America and longed to return to the old country one last time, and on her own account, to find answers to nagging questions about the past.

Despite the book’s title she does not take the train to Trieste when leaving Romania because the chance of detection is too high, rather hitching a ride with an Italian in his little Fiat and passing as his wife.  On her return trip, though, she does take the train, but in the opposite direction.  Her visit enables her to clear up mysteries about her father, Mihai, other people in their circle, and her escape, in a lengthy and rather clumsily presented conversation with an old friend of Mihai’s.  The poignant ending promises the opening of a new chapter, and the final integration of her Romanian and American identities.

It is impossible to tell the extent to which we are reading a novel or autobiography, or something in between.  The early sections feel fictional, but once Mona moves to America the writing takes on the character of memoir; or perhaps it always had that character, but life under Ceaușescu was so strange it is bound to feel like fiction to an outsider.  She conveys the political situation and what everyday life was like in Bucharest and Brașov in the 1970s and ’80s, but the writing is particularly vivid when describing family life and the beauty of the Carpathians.

Mona is not impressed with post-Ceaușescu Romania, expressing the disappointment shared by those who, like her father, had opposed the communist regime, at how little had changed in the years following.  But while she has a good life in America, she also retains a certain ambivalence towards her adopted homeland.  This is symbolised in the references to food: the tastiness of Romanian home cooking versus the terrible quality of mass-produced food in the land of McDonald’s.

A key moment in the novel is writing a competition essay at the age of ten on why she loves her country.  Mona thinks about the melancholic longing expressed in the supposedly untranslatable word dor, a more profound emotion than nostalgia and part of the way Romanians define themselves.  Her essay conveys how she would feel should she lose her country by imagining the lost past she has heard about from her father (suitably edited for an official audience).  Sentiments clearly chiming with the judges, she wins first prize.  She may not think much about the word in America, but it is there, inside her.  In a sense, despite moving across the Atlantic she never leaves Romania at all.