THOUGHT
"The present moment, when you are reading this, has just become the past."
HI, I'M RADU!
LEARN ABOUT MY ARTS JOURNEY
From infinity concept and human superficiality to collecting moments by stopping the time.
Growing up in a small town in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, I was bored. After a childhood full of adventures comparable to Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, I surrounded myself with poetry and music at around 14 years old.
In 1998, after meeting Sasha M., a Croatian photographer, I changed my perspective and took on visual arts. I started shooting 35mm film with my two Zenit E cameras and continued to build a portfolio of mostly landscape photography until 2004.
Unfortunately, 2004 was a dark year. Due to unforeseen circumstances, I lost everything: my cameras, negatives, my developed films, prints and hard-drives, my music, and my poetry.
Three years later, I returned stronger and began to rebuild everything from scratch, this time using digital cameras.
My perspective changed once again, and I never really returned to landscape photography. Focusing more on human subjects, their emotions, expressions, and documenting everyday life gave me the freedom to immortalize moments and moods as I lived and felt them myself. This is how the "My Street" and "Archives" projects were born.
In 2016, after a culturally shocking trip to Japan, I quit my day job and started all my digital art projects, laying down struggles and ideas that had haunted me for over 30 years: the concept of infinity, and the superficiality of human nature.
All five of my digital art projects are open, and while I am planning new works to add to them, I find myself focusing more on the photography projects. I don't decide anything in advance regarding my creative flow, letting my mood dictate what I will create next.
The most important thing is not to stop! As long as I don't stop, I am happy!
Years of wandering
Ideas
Camera
Regrets
My time spent on art projects
Whilst I am spending a lot of time planning ideas for expanding my Digital Arts Projects, I am now more focused on my Photography Projects.
FAVOURITE PHOTOGRAPHERS AND PHOTOGRAPHS
I am more attracted to authenticity than perfection.
The Niépce Heliograph (1827)
It is the earliest photograph produced with the aid of the camera obscura known to survive today.
The Niépce Heliograph passed through a chain of private hands in Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries before it was purchased by the Harry Ransom Center in 1963 as part of the Gernsheim Collection.
Vivian Maier (1926 – 2009)
I LOVE her work. I see the world as she saw it. I understand her. I relate with her awkwardness. I am her.
Unmaterialistic, with a passion for documenting, shooting candid expressions and scenes, with affinity for the poor, seeking out the unusual, heavily opinionated, intensely private, obsessively taking pictures, eccentric, free spirit. It's all there.
Death By Sushi (Sasha Sushi-Sushi)
The photographer who inspired me to pursue photography in the first place is also the author of the most consistent, if not the only, Edmonton Urban Architecture Archive, "Big Ed".
24 years after I first met him, I feel that he is going to be the reason I'll go back into the rabbit hole of shooting film and in-house processing.
Whilst appreciating all street and documentary photographers, there is no space to list them all here.
However, some of the principles I am following and applying in my work are: not to let my vision be dramatically influenced, and not to follow trends.
I like to think that I am reinventing the wheel - without even knowing it!