In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s “excesses”, the first aerial H-bomb was tested over the Bikini Atoll and I was born.
My family, still thinking communism would not last that long, hoped that I would embrace its tradition and become a sculptor or a painter. I hoped that I would conquer the world of images with my full-manual Russian-made camera. But at that time art, including photography, was a dead end road in communist Romania. So, for a while, I became an engineer.
Of course, I never gave up my passion for photography. Though I never thought that communism would ever fall, I kept building up my own world of visual bits and pieces hoping for the miracle that I’ve been dreaming of since childhood. But now, looking back, I can consider those times at least “interesting” artistically speaking. The lack of certain essential products made the entire facade of our lives seem cheap, unpaired and insignificant. The buildings, the streets and as well the clothes were grey, badly sewn and stuffy. Our needs and the strangled fear and rage altered our behavior, our words and actions. But in the middle of this universal crumble, the art was a harmonious presence and the human cohesion had an unrivalled power, comparing to the nowadays frenzy of the “consumer society“. Then, Romanians used to read more, and in the absence of freedom, the constraints gave birth to true values.
So, on December 21st 1989, the dawn of the Revolution, I took to the streets with my camera to shoot my photos amid the real bullet-shooting that left many people dead in just a few days. Before long I was arrested by the communist police, put into jail and released after Ceausescu’s execution. A month later, the day of my dreams came through, as I took back to the street for the first commemoration of the Revolution’s victims: a foreigner with a huge, beautiful camera slipped on the ice right in front of me. I gave him a hand and he gave me his name: Pascal Parrot, photographer for Sigma. That was the day I’ve been waiting for 33 years. The next day, I resigned from my job as engineer and, for the following years I worked as professional photographer for AFP, EPA and AP.
A few years later I took what – at that time – seemed to be a step further: commercial photography. A different world with different rules. Now I work in my own studio, I have digital cameras, light kits, assistants. My clients are advertising agencies. Although my projects are not as high as my ambitions it is still a huge challenge.
But meanwhile, photojournalism was discretely calling me back. So I started to travel farther and farther, to Morocco, Cuba, India or Nepal sensing that overwhelming smell again: the scent of real life. The nostalgia of the times when I was skipping classes wondering through Bucharest with my mechanical "Praktica" camera and some Orwo films in my pocket will always remain wherever I will be.