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This photo series started in 2015, is a non-scientific and non-artistic research of the difference between the image “given” by the mirror and the one “given by the camera” of the people who agreed to participate.
For this I built a device in which the camera “sees” through a mirror that can then be removed.
The participants were asked to take two self-portraits: one in which they see themselves in the mirror and one in which they only see the camera.
The one on the left is the image in the mirror.

The starting point for “Still Untitled” is my long-standing practice in photographing artworks, guided by the principle that a photograph of an artwork should not be considered an artwork itself.

For this series, I created unstable and/or ephemeral objects and structures solely to be photographed. These objects and structures are constructed directly in front of the camera lens and are made in such a way that they achieve three-dimensional coherence only in their two-dimensional photographic representation.

It’s a reversed process. In art reproductions, the photograph aims to hide its presence, functioning like a window through which the artwork is viewed. In these photographs, the subject is volatile, and its representation is the artwork.

This series of pictures is a collection of “poses”, the result of a study on “posing” in which friends and volunteers participated between 2000-2007.
I built a photomaton type system in the studio with a mirror and a large format camera and each participant was left alone for an unlimited time to take a nude self-portrait.

Around the cities of Romania, during the capitalist years, some sorts of luxury favelas have emerged. Although these ensembles are meant as residential areas for Romanian middle and upper class, the metropolitan landscape is formed outside of an urban planning preconception.

People build whatever house they want, wherever they own land, they consider roads anywhere they can get with the car, there is no infrastructure, but it builds along the way. People make fences so their habitats would end at their limits.

Outside the limits there is a no man’s land with its own life: garbage and debris disposal, wandering stray dogs gone wild and people who search through the garbage.

With each one building according to his own will, the urban environment was unconsciously built by the community, free of standards. I think these places are a better reflection of the collective’s intent, of the community character, than the places which are developed according to a plan.

In a moment of distraction I was caught aware of their beauty.

I was looking for couples manifesting their love in buses or trams during night time. I followed them by car through the jammed traffic of Bucharest and hardly caught them. It was a fake paparazzo experience, following fake victims.
But, over time, I continued to photograph the trams from my window being more interested in a mood, dear to me, that reverie of transported people.

A few years ago, I used to go to the swimming pool. After swimming for an hour, when I left, I rested for a few minutes on the shore of the nearby lake.
At one point the lake was poisoned and dead fish floated gently on the surface of the water. I looked carefully at one of them and was amazed how such a beautiful thing dies, how man does not care about this beauty and is always in a hurry to do something else, killing everything in his way. But at the same time, I was amazed at the ease with which nature creates and destroys, things of a beauty and complexity that we cannot comprehend with our minds.
After a while, the lake was dried up and a bulldozer kept digging into the shore for a summer and an autumn. Where the lake had been, a thin stream of water remained and a rich reed grew around it. All kinds of birds that I had never seen before came and nested in the reeds. I bought a pair of binoculars. I was happy.
Then the bulldozer drove away leaving behind a concrete wall. The lake was flooded in place, the nests floated gently on the surface of the water.
A rat was killed on the street where I live. I watched him sink into the asphalt with the passage of time, and the cars, until he became a kind of impression, which, however, was still him, had texture, expression. It seemed that change was a continuation of life. Not of his life, but of the life that passes through all of us.
These observations linked, in a strange way, in my mind, human violence, death and beauty.
I have made a habit of driving slowly and photographing animals killed by cars on the road. But as the photos piled up, my interest in the subject waned. The inner state brought by the contemplation of the lake dissipated.

The 40-year crisis came with the fear of death, with the feeling of the emptiness of life. With the painful contrast between the beauty of the world and the sense of the meaninglessness of one’s existence. Anxiety, depression, psychologists. But among these I was lucky enough to see a bright place, the refuge of childhood, the drawing.
I resumed this activity from where I had left it many years ago, practically with the same means.