The first month in Isolation

• Prize
  Shortlist
• Photographer
  Sylvia de Swaan, United States
• Date of Photograph
  2020
• Category
  Americas
• Studio
  photography
• Image Location
  USA
• Socials

These are tense times, but there have been others in the trajectory of my life. I don’t mind being alone, but being in voluntary isolation has brought back memories, and has also led me to explore areas of my house that I rarely go to, like my attic - an ill kept space that could do with a sweeping and a view from the window that I’d never seen in that way before. It also brought to mind the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, the hidden attic where she wrote her diary and spent the last years of her young life.

• Biography
  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.
• Awards
  My photographic works have earned me grants, residencies and fellowships from a variety of sources, including Art Matters, The Aaron Siskind Foundation, CEC/ArtsLink travel grants, Light Work, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art; Austrian Ministry of Culture, Constance Saltonstall Foundation, Anderson Ranch Art Center, four fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (1994, 1998/2008/2016) and the Creative Artists Project Grant by the Society for Photographic Education. My work have been exhibited regionally, nationally and internationally.