Transylvania continues to demonstrate its potential for photographers in a project described by Zoe Whitfield’s short article for i-D, posted on 16 December 2022. Roxana Mirtea and Alec Iatan, who were born in Romania but currently live in Paris, decided to return to the country after a nine-year gap to photograph young people living in the rural parts of Transylvania. This was a contrast to their previous work together on fashion shoots.
The series has the working title Transylvania Youth, and its aim is to show
what it is like growing up in the region’s villages, and also to address a
certain ambivalence about Romania by the pair, allowing them to reconnect with
their homeland after years away. It was
not an entirely arbitrary location to choose; Iatan has relatives there and they
had both visited previously, but they do bring an outsider’s eye to bear.
Shot using a mixture of colour and
black-and-white, the subjects, found through vigorous networking, are posed in
natural surroundings wearing everyday clothing, with no sign of ethnic costume
and no attempt to show them in an unduly impoverished setting. They are teenagers who happen to be living in
the countryside. It seems from
Whitfield’s interview that Mirtea and Iatan concentrated on the Saxon villages,
so it is unclear to what extent their portraits are representative of
Transylvania more generally.
The background in fashion photography is
noticeable, and the images are attractively presented, but we get little sense
from these samples of how the young people live. The article’s title hints at kinship with
Margaret Mead’s book on Samoa, but on the evidence so far this is not going to
be an ethnographic treatment of Transylvanian adolescence.
Having spent a month moving around during
the first leg of the project, Mirtea and Iatan intend to continue it and
eventually produce a book. Perhaps that
will broaden the scope to provide context and explore how it feels to grow up
and reach adulthood in a place with fewer opportunities than elsewhere.
During the interview, Iatan indicates a
fracture: ‘There was an interesting connection between people and the environment
when I was growing up, but it’s disappearing.
In another five years, things will change more….’ If the timescale is correct, their work will
take on an historical significance sooner rather than later, but they will need
to move away from a fashion aesthetic if they want to explore that evolution in
any depth.
Zoe Whitfield. ‘Photographing the quiet
beauty of coming-of-age in Transylvania’,
i-D, 16 December 2022:
https://i-d.vice.com/en/article/bvmkaa/photographing-coming-of-age-in-transylvania
