The Elusive Self

The Elusive Self” Who am I really, I ask myself as I watch my elongated shadow play across the railroad tracks along Lake Ontario; or my shattered reflection in a window of an abandoned gas station on route 49; or when I hold an I.D. picture from my childhood refugee papers against the background of a train journey through post communist Eastern Europe; or me with a long ago lover in a penny arcade photo booth in the 1990s. My self-portraits are about intangible and fleeting moments of memory; mining the past, remembered dreams, interior spaces. They are about metaphor, poetry, vibration.

I’m a Romanian born art and documentary photographer who has lived and worked in Mexico, Europe and the United States. I work on long-term exploratory projects that are informed by themes of transience and loss, individual and collective memory and identity; the state of the world and the neighborhoods where I live. My longest running body of work, titled “Return,” consisting a series of solitary train Journeys through post communist Eastern Europe, to explore the terrain of my early childhood. which my mother, sister and I traversed as stateless refugees after WWII.