ROMANIAS
Both as a book and exhibition, ROMANIAS dives into contemporary Romania, through the lens of world-class photographers and writers, as the country celebrates its 100 year anniversary (1918–2018) and commemorates its 30 years since the Revolution (1989–2019).
One Country
Countless Realities
This project, spearheaded by the EIDOS Foundation in Bucharest, gave carte blanche to five renowned international photographers from Magnum Photos—Bieke Depoorter, Thomas Dworzak, Paolo Pellegrin, Alec Soth, and Newsha Tavakolia—to deliver their vision of Romania today. Our mission and challenge in bringing to life this overdue photographic MRI of Romania was to balance and contextualize the Magnum photographers’ perception of the country as outsiders. We wanted to, through this book and exhibition, visually bridge Romania’s past with its path forward, and connect the country’s self-image to how it is—or may be—perceived outside, whether now or in the future.
Magnum’s five parachute-style angles were therefore paralleled to the more local perspective of a Romanian photographer, Cristian Movilă, and six authors: anthropologist Alec Bălășescu, poet Andrei Codrescu, psychiatrist Gabriel Diaconu, writer Gideon Jacobs, historian Elena Tănase, and actor Adrian Văncică. This constellation of voices was furthermore orchestrated by Florian Ebner, Head of the Department of Photography at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and designed by Sascha Lobe of Pentagram in London.
Working with so many giants, our vision to create a concerto of perspectives to collectively question issues of representation at large only better revealed the many layers of this country—the many Romanias. More than a book, we advocated for ROMANIAS to be a multilayered conversation of images, texts, and viewpoints involving both foreigners and Romanians in Romania, as well as Romanians from abroad. This ambition for several realities to coexist within one book was also manifested in our choice to produce a single trilingual edition, in Romanian, French, and English. The honesty of the result as a never-complete, multidisciplinary picture is, in our mind and purpose, a much needed refresher to the classic model of dusty-glossy photojournalistic books.
