Bucharest, 2008–2011. Twenty years of democracy.
Is twenty years enough for a city to shed its skin, to move from a communist capital to a smooth, settled European metropolis? At the time, Bucharest was still in flux. In tension. Under construction.
This series captures those years through the eyes of a photographer in the making, armed with her first SLR as she wandered the city. The framing is sometimes hesitant, the focus imperfect, but the gaze is direct, curious, unfiltered. She photographs the city as it reveals itself: ordinary scenes, sometimes harsh, sometimes almost caricatural, always dense.
The rawness of these images echoes both her early learning and the era itself: a long, turbulent transformation, caught between a communist legacy and accelerated capitalism, between gleaming new multinationals and the persistent traces of the past. Everyday survival mingles with hope and the excitement of change, in an almost acrobatic balancing act. In the streets, the city’s Balkan soul pulses with a raw, abrasive, vibrant energy.
But a city does not transform in twenty years. Nor do its people or ways of life. More than snapshots, these photographs are fragments of time, where memory and the present coexist, rarely without friction. Without dramatising or embellishing, they offer a bittersweet glimpse of a city becoming something else, without quite leaving behind what it was.
A tale from the East, where the heroes are simply ordinary people.