Andrei Farcasanu

Copyright Andrei Farcasanu

The British Journal of Photography website carries an article dated 26 August 2020 about Romanian Barcelona-based photographer Andrei Farcasanu.  He is one of two winners of the 2020 OpenWalls Arles photography ‘Growth’ category award for his Timeless Interventions set.

He handcrafts small lith prints, mostly of nature and inanimate objects.  The fuzzy coolness of the photographic process reminds us how our perceptual apparatus is a filter as much as it is a communication channel: the chemical bath reduces the clarity of the image, while our brain chemistry reduces the clarity of what we absorb from the world.

To me, the images in Farcasanu’s output are reminiscent of Maya Deren and Alexander Hamid’s 1943 Meshes of the Afternoon, a compilation of details abstracted from reality clutching at a broader meaning.  Farcasanu’s work to date though has a relatively narrow range, limiting the possible associations.

He arranges his photographs thematically, but the themes are imposed retrospectively, indicating an arbitrariness to the grouping of some of them.  Monochrome provides a unity that would not have been possible with colour, and they are rescued from a charge of banality by the historical gravitas of black-and-white, plus no doubt the attractive printing.

The results are then dressed up in a philosophical framework; the BJP article refers to Farcasanu ‘drawing on the metaphysical philosophies of thinkers from Augustine of Hippo in the 5th century to Immanuel Kant and Albert Einstein,’ plus references to inspirations drawn from impressionist, expressionist and Eastern European painting and Eastern philosophy.

Throwing in what feel like random historical figures and art movements adds nothing to an understanding of these small images, though it is relevant Farcasanu has a PhD in photography, which would have entailed supplying a theoretical superstructure.  However, stabs at exaggerated profundity do his modest photographs, more style than substance, no favours.

Duminică (Sunday)

Apart from the beginning and end, Sînziana Nicola’s 2013 short Duminică takes place entirely in a car as, we eventually discover, a brother and sister are driving to a hospital, where a relative is dying.  Their emotional distance is signalled right at the beginning when she waits outside his block, smoking, and their greetings are perfunctory.  Much of the journey is taken up by the sister, for something to say, telling her brother about a strange experience she had when she went to an interview at ten in the evening and tried to take a taxi afterwards.

A man got in who neither she nor the driver knew, and when he suggested he take her home and she objected he became aggressive, leading to a row in the street.  When she took another cab, he and his friends followed behind, shouting.  As she haltingly tells her tale, her brother disapproves, obviously thinking she handled the situation badly and naively underestimated the danger she could have been in.  He blames her and her 'big mouth' rather than the people with whom she had the run-in.  Exasperated, he wonders who would be holding an interview at 10 o’clock, and asks why she didn’t call him.

Her response is that it was 'an unconventional events company', the interview a waste of time, and she can manage her own affairs.  Determined to finish the story, she becomes heated defending herself, one of those situations in which whatever is said is going to irritate to the other person.  Annoyed, he won’t allow her to smoke and turns off the music she puts on.  They subside, tired of the friction and an uneasy silence follows as he steers them through heavy city traffic.  He asks her for chocolate, which he had previously refused, a symbol of their truce.  We leave them standing outside the hospital entrance, smoking to postpone the inevitable.

This Sunday is definitely not a day of rest.  In less than a quarter of an hour we have been shown a situation common among siblings having little in common but bound together by family, so obliged to spend time in each other’s company.  This is an especial difficulty for the younger one, who risks being patronised.  Simply shot from the back seat, the viewer’s interpretation arises from their tone and body language as much as the words, signalling years of the big brother despairing of his undisciplined sister (tellingly he wears a seatbelt but she does not), and sister wondering whether she will ever be taken seriously.

This was Sînziana Nicola’s first film as director, and it won her a prize at the Stuttgarter Filmwinter – Festival for Expended Media.  It is available on Cinepub:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k163TPVFga4&list=PLn0Jy9I2VIyRdOlNnOsu8TCaUSUDHrwzP&index=53&t=0s

Adriana-Ioana Cosma

Copyright Adriana-Ioana Cosma

The July/August Journal of the Royal Photographic Society carries an article on half a dozen graduates who have been following BA or MA photography courses at British universities.  One of these is Romanian Adriana-Ioana Costa, who has been studying for a BA in photography at Edinburgh Napier University.  The project featured in the double-page spread (pp. 518-19) is Little Red One, about her grandfather: his nickname was Roşiştea, given by his mother when he was born as he had red hair, and he was known as Red in the village.  Pre-1989 he was a farmer, and afterwards an independent smallholder in Vărai, a village in the Maramureș.  He lived with his wife and mother-in-law (‘whose spirituality combined Orthodox-Christian rites with old pagan rituals’).  Cosma lived with them until the age of 5, and visited during holidays afterwards.

She started Little Red One in 2019 as she realised she had not photographed her late grandmother much and was grateful she could still photograph her grandfather.  Her efforts became part of her BA submission, though it is as much about the village, where she has noticed a growing tension in the past 20 years between modernisation and a desire not to change.  Like many places it is suffering depopulation, with Cosma told in January 2020 that only about 100 people were now living there (down from 275 in the Census of 2011), and no babies born for years.  Of those left, 42 were widowed and living alone, of which Cosma’s grandfather was one.  Yet Cosma says that while it is sad to see signs of decline, there is hope also, with the people keeping going and maintaining their faith.

Little Red One is one of the projects on Cosma’s website, but the others are not specifically about Romania.  However, her Instagram page has a wider selection of Romanian photographs.  There are some of the landscape around Vărai, but many capture still life, those moments suggesting permanence but that we know outside the photograph hold within them the seeds of decay.  Her grandfather appears in some of the photographs, but surprisingly never a close portrait (his red hair apparently gone).  It would be nice to see more of Vărai to have a rounded view, though the overwhelming feeling of these is indeed of decline.  There is more life on display in pictures from the 2019 Marmația winter festival, rural folk traditions transplanted to an urban setting.  They put one in mind of the Moldovan winter celebrations depicted in Masquerade and in Felicia Simion’s ethnographies, a more systematic attempt to record customs and folklore across rural Romania.