Sabina Baciu

I only found out about Sophie Calle as I’m reading the book  “The Photograph as Contemporary Art” by Charlotte Cotton. I was completely fascinated by the description and wanted to know more about her. She is a French woman with an amazing body of work, always acting at the intersection between public, on display and private or intimate.

Her artworks very often involved following and meetings strangers. Such as Suite Vénitienne, a book that resulted from Sophie’s following a man she met at a party.

‘For months I followed strangers in the street. For the pleasure of following them, not because they particularly interested me. I photographed them without their knowledge, took note of their movements, then finally lost sight of them and forgot them.

At the end of January 1980, on the streets of Paris, I followed a man whom I lost sight of a few minutes later in the crowd. That very evening, by chance, he was introduced to me at an opening. During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice.’

She left Paris and went to Venice, trying to find this man. After finding out in what hotel did he live, she persuaded a woman who lived opposite to let Sophie photograph the man. She remained in Venice for two weeks.

A year later Sophie returned to Venice for another project. She found a job as a maid and took pictures of the hotel rooms. Then she tried to imagine who were the hotel guests, based on their objects and the way they were left in the hotel room.

“For each room there was a photograph of the bed undone, of other objects in the room, and a description day by day of what I found there.”

Sophie’s photographs are documenting her artwork, they are proofs of the process that lies beneath the image. The value of her artwork comes from the ideas behind as well as the realisation of them. The photographs are the last link in the work.

“For ‘The Hotel’ I spent one year to find the hotel, I spent three months going through the text and writing it, I spent three months going through the photographs and I spent one day deciding it would be this size and this frame…it’s the last thought in the process.”

In Chromatic Diet the artist ate every day food of only one colour, in an exercising of acting/being a character from Paul Auster’s novel “Leviathan”.

There are many other projects by Sophie Calle that are extremely interesting, intriguing and usually funny. I would love to meet Sophie, she must be such a fascinating person! Check out two of her interviews here and here.

Photos: All rights reserved by Sophie Calle

Jordan Matter is a New-York based photographer that created an amazing series: Dancers among us. He asked a couple of professional dancers to volunteer for his project and perform some “guerilla dancing” in Manhattan.

The poses were spontaneous, in the sense that most of the time they didn’t have permission to shoot in the store/museum/restaurant. For example, this picture is taken in the Apple store and they only had 30 seconds before the guards asked them to leave.

His project aims to illustrate the unique skill of dancers. In an interview, Jordan declared: ”I was thinking about the recession and what that meant for talented people who may have lost their jobs. Are you still a dancer if you are not paid to perform? Or are you still a chef when you don’t have a kitchen to cook in? It is about people who walk the streets with this incredible skill who could just advertise their ability any time they wanted. Dance is always a part of them and they are always dancers”

The work is between performance and photography, as all of the acts involve the audience, and draw a great deal out of the context and the participation of the public.

Photos: All rights reserved by Jordan Matter

German Saez is not German, but Argentinian. And you can definitely feel his hot latin blood rushing through his veins while taking these pictures. His erotic series started as a game during intimate moments with his girlfriends, but soon it became a style that defined his photography.

You can say it’s easy to take beautiful photos when you have beautiful women as models. But it’s not the models that intrigue me in these pictures. If it was just the women, it would have made no difference between German Saez’s work and any other erotic photographer. What draws me to these pictures is the narrative quality, the fact that they seem to be just a frame in a feature-film that we don’t have access to. You remember that this is how Guy Bourdin became one of the most famous fashion photographers.

German Saez also has a portfolio of concerts, portraits and street shots. But I’m not impressed by them, as even though they are good photos, they don’t have the magnetism of his erotic images. For more photos [ that were too hot for this blog] check out fotosprivadas.com.ar

I just returned from Prague, I went there for a couple days with my work. I loved its candy-coloured buildings and quiet streets.

I would definitely come back and take a walk with a boy on the Charles bridge in the evening – it was so beautiful I didn’t take any pictures. Here’s a picture of the street jazz band that perform there every day though.

Praga is the Art Nouveau capital – such great architecture – beautiful restaurants and cafes.
Great sculptures by David Cerny – I love art in public space that makes you very confused. Also check out his crazy website - http://www.davidcerny.cz

I was just talking to a friend how much we’d like to open a photography museum in Bucharest, and after a couple of minutes of ‘oooh’ and ‘aaah’s we realised perhaps opening a museum is too difficult. So we settled for a gallery – and that’s where we left the discussion.

The next day I came across the news that the first Romanian photography gallery in Paris opens! ooooh! aaaah! This makes me very very happy, as if somebody was listening to me and my friend’s thoughts. The gallery is called Rue de l’Exposition and it will work in a space of the Romanian Cultural Institute in Paris. The first exhibition is Paysages intérieurs with Bogdan Gîrbovan and Michele Bressan [curator Katia Dănila].

I don’t know too much about the exhibition just yet, but as soon as I find out I’ll present you the artists and their photographs into more details.

À bientôt!

Here is the website of this guy, Jacques Pepin – he’s amazing.

Dear friends and visitors,

I finally arrived in  Bucharest. In the meantime I also managed to fall on ice and break my arm.

What follows for me: a couple of days of family time, Christmassy laziness and going out with my best friend. I hope you’ll also enjoy your holidays and have cozy times with your dear ones. I’ll be back on the blog soon.

This weekend I’m gonna move a lot of stuff around Belgium, pack, unpack, pack – so that Monday I’m flying to Bucharest! See you soon.

I can’t tell you too much about Dragos, as he doesn’t share too much information about himself.  Another mysterious photographer! We only know he was born in ’82, has an engineering background, lives in Bucharest and started taking photographs about 3 years ago.

We also know for sure he takes beautiful snapshots, very different in nature but wonderful nevertheless.

Both his staged photographs as well as the snapshots present us with the poetry of life, the way situations, animals, people, clouds, cars come into formation and create a wonderful living sculpture.

And what I like is that these images are not trying to send a message, they’re not political and don’t take any side. They are not even named, which leaves a cosy space of interpretation. For me, they are very poetic images. It’s like when you turn your head up to the sky and see how the clouds are shaped as a hippopotamus: C’est la poesie!

All rights reserved by Dragoș Butcă

For more photos check out Dragos’s Flickr account and blog.