Conceptual Photography – Alexandru Paul

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.

Still Untitled, digital photograph, 2024

Still Untitled, digital photograph, 2026

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.