How did you get involved in making polaroids?
I am into photography since I was a little girl. My father being a photographer, it wasn’t hard to follow into his steps. At home we had a little darkroom where I observed my father working from. I was fascinated about the smell of photographic solutions and I always wondered how the image appears on paper. Many years after that, I became a photographer myself. I prefer analog photography and surrealism (made in the darkroom, of course).
I could say that I am an experimental person.
I like to use different mediums to see how far I can go with an image, to distort reality into another reality. To make stories. Beside the fact that I grew up with Polaroid and film cameras, my start in Polaroid shots was not so long ago. A good friend of mine, also a photographer, gave me as a present a pack of polaroid paper. That was it. I started to “play”. When I finished the paper, I put all photographs together. Then, with my experimental touch, I made a new story. This is how “Shadows”, a series exposed recently at Cosman Foundation was born.
Where do you get your inspiration in making these images from?
My inspiration is everywhere. First of all, I find inspiration in little things, such as grass, walls, windows, anything that can be transformed. Also I find inspiration in human condition, in human mind, in duality.
What attracted you in starting doing emulsions?
I was attracted by the process of image appearing. Now I have nothing and then I have a whole new world full of different realities. At the same time I love to experiment.
With emulsion, it is never the same.
I can add/ scratch different effects that relates with my personality. And non the least, I love it because I am attached with traditional forms of photography. Don’t get me wrong. I like digital too, but of course, in most cases, I manipulate that too.
Your photographs are depicted as in a kind of a sci-fi dream, how would you describe this style? Your style sort of lets the impression of transience. Is it something specific that gives you the inspiration and leads you into it?
I love surrealism and deep minded questions. My works, even if they are polaroids, analog, or digital, they all have an inside twist. All tend to surreal and psychological in a way. I have to admit that my main preoccupation is the human mind and thoughts. For example, “Shadows”, the project that you see below is a personal interpretation of human thinking.
As a human being, you can exist in several worlds or created existences at the same time
There may be situations, emotions, memories, overlapping fragments, giving rise to a new, rational or irrational existence. Human thinking, no matter what its nature, always accompanies us. The polaroids presented encourage the assumption of these overlapping worlds existing in each of us, to the detriment of their isolation or blocking at the level of the subconscious. The manual intervention on the photo just comes to emphasize that any mental reality can be changed depending on various internal and / or external factors.
If you had the last pack of polaroid film and the last Polaroid camera in the world, how would you use it? And where?
This is fun. First of all I would photograph the package box. Then a graveyard, a crow, something with water, an old house(almost demolished) that I am fond of, a cat and a weird wall. For the last one, maybe myself. Where? This is easy. In a small village of Romania, where my grandparents lived, where I learned so much. There would not have been a “me” if that place didn’t exist.