From around its 100th anniversary on, photography constituted histories other than the classic one grounded on technological advancements and prowess. In the 1930s and in the late 1960s-early 1970s, photography became aligned respectively with the communication and the art systems. With the boom of illustrated press, photojournalistic material was consequently in high demand. Not only photography’s indexicality but also its narrative potential and serial usage were largely explored. Conceived as a means of communication, photography has ever since composed this system, sharing a common thought, production and history[1]. Such shared grounds with the Arts came about decades later.
Developments in sociology, anthropology and semiotics, with the photographic understood as a category[2], have informed numerous artists’ œuvres. More importantly, they have opened up new paths to definitely legitimize photography as an artistic practice beyond earlier borderline conceptions, freeing the medium from visual juggling. The use of photography by Pop Art and Conceptual Art as well as the fundamental dissemination of documentary photography approaches that made critical and programmatic use of the document aesthetics and, together have cultivated photography’s and art’s mutual interest and finally established, as it happened with Communications, a common thought, production and history[3].
It should be mentioned, nevertheless, that such an understanding has long faced resistance from major actors in the arts field when referring to artistic practices that used photography as an end (as opposed to as support). The artistic practice of documentary photography has only been broadly accepted in the international art circuit in the 1990s and 2000s, depending on the region. Nevertheless, this genre of photography was crucial for consolidating the contemporariness of photography and art thinking[4].
Dani Ghercă’s (1988, Bucharest) photographic work is nurtured by this legacy, as well as by the reverberations of the digital turn initiated in the 1990s and still finding its ways and theoretical repertoire.
During the first nine years of his production, from 2010 to 2019, Ghercă worked with analog photography on long-term projects that documented Bucharest, making use of both the document and the snapshot aesthetics. Bucharest (2010-2017), Tunnels & Pipes (2011-2015) and A Diagram of Utopia (2014-2017) are such examples.
Most series from this period are observations on urbanism – in its intrinsic relation to infrastructure and people’s living condition – within the very specific context of the country’s capital, where the impacts of becoming a global capitalist democracy intermingles with the lasting bequest of communism.
Born the year before the fall of Ceaușescu’s regime, the artist was raised in one of the numerous residential complexes in a working-class neighbourhood, with his parents migrating to the city in the 1970s in quest for better opportunities. A Diagram of Utopia depicts such urban landscapes focusing on the built environment and how people inhabit it and its surroundings. The collective edifices with numerous units are omnipresent and greatly shape the public space and urban life and culture.
Housing stratification in contemporary Romania is a matter that appears transversally in Ghercă’s œuvre. Tunnels & Pipes presents daily scenes of a group of unhoused people that have made the sewer near Bucharest’s Central Station their home. Indirectly, the series exposed the lack of urban structures to provide for people in vulnerable situations. Whereas the majority of Ghercă’s works are thought to embody large format Diasecs for exhibition, this series is only available for viewing on his website. At least until now, with the exception of a triptych in which three different men, one in each image, are seen entering a hole in the pavement with their faces mainly unshown. In a public gallery context, the visitor cannot see much but strive to put themselves in the other’s shoes.
In contrast, the four largest administrative buildings of Bucharest that were built before 1989, currently nearly empty and unused, are the subject of Four Houses (2015-2016). Here, Ghercă does not resort to a large series of images detailing the constructions and their function. The work is simply made of four individual photographs of Casa Scinteii’s, Casa Radio’s, Casa Poporului’s, and Casa Stiintei’s facades, emphasizing their scope. In today’s urban planning, these massive presences have partial life. Yet they hold their historic stature and still determineBucharest’s identity. The images were shot with expired films as in most projects in Ghercă’s early days. This choice, even if led by economic reasons, engendered a contradictory gesture – that of preserving with decaying material – that is not void of symbolism. Neither are the visual results of much paler colors than those dreamt of or propagandized in times when people believed in utopia.
Ghercă has no intention to take a political stance and indeed his works have an ambiguous quality in which one might doubt where the critical commentary lies. The artist prefers to leave it to the eyes of the beholder.
Nowadays, he states that he no longer believes in the role of photography to document reality. And in a movement towards a more abstract proposal, Ghercă has inaugurated a shift in his work. In 2019, he gave in to the digital apparatus, as he had then more difficulties to buy film and his new medium format digital camera offered him high quality images and immediacy.
Critical artistic approaches tackling photography’s truth regime have permeated postmodern perspectives not being original to the digital advent. But, somehow working with electronic processed images gave the artist the unapologetic freedom to detach his work from photography’s proximity to the idea of reality and documentary inclination. Meanwhile, he pursued his interest in urbanism and related issues.
His latest and ongoing series A Glimpse of Disconnection (2020- ) is not made in Bucharest, at least not the act of shooting. Aerial cityscapes from, so far, Paris, Berlin, London, Frankfurt, New York, Chicago, Dubai and Kuala Lumpur form the basis of this work, although the locations are unidentifiable. Their interchangeability is key in the series and mainly attained through the use of Photoshop. It is not the first time Ghercă, who currently lives between Bucharest and Brussels, interferes in the images after photographing them. In Bucharest, for example, he has experimented with light leak-like exposure in the darkroom before developing the films. Some of the resulting images seem older, worn out or accidental. But in the new series, the gestures involved in the post-production have clearly grown in importance.
Playing with highlights and shadows to enhance some lines and obscure certain areas, Ghercă has created chameleonic images: they resemble from abstractions to electronic circuit boards to urban plans to anonymous cityscapes. In addition, the large format prints are at times placed in a direction other than the regular upward position, welcoming the disorientation. The series gives the impression of parallel realms. Still, it is not a matter of constructing a fiction but of building on the real to lay bare the intangible: the sense of disconnect, as the title suggests. Of the estrangement stirred up by the impersonal, individualistic core of our metropolis. Of the disengagement from concrete reality provoked by our Big Tech dominated world system.
The series is expanding, as are the artist’s horizons.
– by Daniella Géo
[1] Poivert Michel, « La condition moderne de la photographie au XXe siècle », L’Ombre du Temps, Paris, Jeu de Paume, 2004
[2] Dubois Philippe, L’acte photographique et autres essais, 2e ed., Bruxelles : Editions Labor, 1990, (Collection Média)
[3] Poivert Michel, op. cit.
[4] Poivert Michel, La photographie contemporaine, Paris : Flammarion, 2002, 192 p.
