The Elusive Self

• Prize
• Photographer
  Sylvia de Swaan, United States
• Studio
  photography
• Instagram
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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.

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.