TRAJECTORIES 2025 | LSFMD ANNUAL STAFF-DOCTORAL SYMPOSIUM | CALL FOR PAPERS OR CONTRIBUTIONS

I am submitting visual work for this year symposium at the University of West London

I will present these images, hopefully I will have 3-4 good photoengraved prints. I think I want to use Japanese paper. If that will not work, I will print them using an inkjet printer, very likely on Hahnemuhle Rice Paper.

I test print them on ILFORD GALERIE Washi Torinoko is a fine art paper with a traditional, Washi, Japanese base. Here are the results

The paper has a nice feel, it is not as translucent as I would like, but it holds contrast and sharpness very well.

The work will be presented in an exhibition space and I will have a conversation with colleagues and visitors, answering questions and listening to suggestions and interpretations.

This is the text I sent, and it will go together with the work.

Beneath the Surface

These images are a continuation of the ongoing work on the River Thames. My persistent obsession with walking alongside its banks is something I can't fully explain.

Making these images is very technical and ritualistic. I use a 5x4 camera with Black and White negative film. After setting up the tripod and installing the camera, I frame and focus meticulously under the dark cloth. Take light readings, adjust aperture and exposure speed and insert the film holder. While engaged in this technical process, my thoughts drift beneath the surface of what is in front of me.

I am thinking of the lives taken by the River, the discarded objects, rituals, the hidden stories the River could tell. I think about the mourning, the letting go, and suppression, the lost belongings, the ships bringing in stolen colonial goods, money, and power, and poverty. Pollution. Children swimming. People drowning. Mothers crying.

The River Thames becomes a kind of archive keeper, holding on what society wants to discard, hide, forget, while its bed is lined with mud, garbage, old items, bones, notes to the dead,  echoing with each tide and ebb the forgotten stories.

The pollution of the city is dumped into the same waters that made this place into a city. The water is filthy. The smell is so thick. Each ebb reveals the same river bed but in a different state. I photograph the riverbed exposed by the tide going down; my photographs juxtapose movement and residue, revealing the hidden and unseen. This process becomes archaeological and forensic, exploring the river as a place multilayered with loss, history, memory, power, labour, and ritual.

I will also present the chemigrams and archival photos book I made.

I will be changing the text in the book to this:

This book is a personal exploration of traces in memory and in material

Photography was around me since childhood, introduced to me through the work of my grandfather, Emil Dura. What began as a familial influence gradually became part of my own artistic and professional life. I grew up surrounded by his small black-and-white prints from weddings, funerals, and daily community life in a small village in northern Romania. These photographs were made between the 1960s and 1980s. His photographs are intimate documents that open conversations about him and the people he photographs.

Last year, during a difficult period when my wife was seriously unwell, I found myself engaging with camera-less processes such as rayograms, chemigrams, and watergrams. It was a way to stay focused and gave me a way to cope. I was attracted by the unpredictability of this process. I was working with light, water, chemistry, time, and chance. Each print is shaped by the chemical reaction of water, darkroom chemistry and light to the photosensitive paper.

I used some of the chemigrams I made to create this handmade book exploring flow, memory, and impermanence. As the project developed, I asked what would happen if I used my grandfather’s photographs in the book. What emerged was an overlap of past and present merged through the process. It transformed the book into a personal vessel of inherited photographs and experimental imagery, creating a space for my virtual collaboration and conversation with my grandfather Emil, who passed away when I was 3 years old.

The blank pages between images are intentional, they allow for a pause to reflect and space to breathe. The dark marks on them are traces of the chemical reaction, presenting like ghostly imprints of thought or memory.  I sequenced his prints and the chemigrams carefully.

The work became an intersection of memory, loss, and material exploration. It honours what is fleeting, embraces what is unpredictable, and invites me to witness a rhythm of life fluid, shifting, like a river

Updates 2.06.2025

My work was accepted in the symposium and I will be presenting the chemigrams book and 2 or 3 photo etchings