The exhibition that was presented at the Half-King My Exhibition is called Internal Displacements
and that was in 2010.
It was created and produced through the funds of a residency in France.
So unlike an assignment, its entire goal was actually to become an exhibition and screened
as a very short film and that's very different from most assignments or targets that photographers
have.
In 2007, I had gone to Kosovo to photograph the youth under the umbrella of the UN and
mainly UNICEF and then the following year I was given an assignment to do this very similar
work in Georgia and Abkhazia and those two venues or countries for me were all about
this transitional countries and countries that don't really exist yet.
Kosovo was independent and not a country and Abkhazia is still part of a frozen conflict
but not a country, part of Georgia but a highly disputed area with Russia.
Transnistria, which is where Internal Displacements takes place, is a sliver of a country between
Moldova and the Ukraine.
The country is unrecognized by the international community but clearly it exists and I felt
there was the last piece of the trip that I was doing in these transitional zones and
frozen conflicts and places that are, I wouldn't call lost in time but kind of frozen in time.
These floating Polaroids of these countries and I was very fascinated by that so I started
with Kosovo, moved on to Abkhazia and then when I was able to get this grant I wanted
to finish the final chapter and this was going to be Transnistria.
This was taking an orphanage in Moldova that wasn't actually in Transnistria but just near
the border and they're speaking Russian and Romanian.
The reason I found that to be extremely relevant is that because of the war and because of
the different structures of Moldova and the way Transnistria split apart orphans came
because of that struggle.
A lot of families were split apart and a lot of people decided to either choose Transnistria
or Moldova and some of them were left behind in unwanted territories.
I tend to believe that the youth are the first group of people that question themselves more
by just nature of what they are than a generation that's slightly older.
I was very interested in them because they didn't have a preconditioned idea on what
they were and what they were going to become so this perpetual transition and I thought
that fitted the background where I was making this project very pertinent.
I found him playing football with a group of people in this old terrain like it was
an old basketball court but all broken up cement.
He watched the game as I watched the game.
During breaks everybody would smoke and he in particular looked like a young boy who
shouldn't be smoking but did with the other boys.
The way he looked was completely vulnerable and I went directly to him and I photographed
a few portraits of him.
I found that the way he was wearing shorts but not playing the game, the way that he
held the cigarettes looked like he's been smoking for 20 years and he was looking right
at me.
There was no fear, no fear but no shame, no pride, just 15 year old kid looking at me
and I found that to be very becoming.
The youth, they do travel and they do leave but not that much from what I remember and
they always come back.
So they're really holding on to their identity of Transnistrians as I think Kosovars would
do the same and Abkhazians have done from what I've seen.
And people who've been kicked out of those places, their only dream is to come back
there.
I was not allowed to take that picture and almost got into trouble doing it.
And that border guard had a gun, I think two on his belt, you can't see it in the image
but I know that's illegal in terms of international law, border patrol is not allowed to carry
any arms on him.
It was a little shack in the middle of nowhere with this guy holding these two guns and he
stopped us and I just thought that was fantastic and in the background you see that people,
you don't see people actually climbing over there but that's where they climb over in
order to get into the country and I think if you have the right amount of cigarettes
or vodka or whatever then you just walk in, that's it.
That's the Nistria River and that's basically what separates Moldova and Transnistria.
What's really fascinating about that little piece of river and that piece of land, what
it symbolizes is that you can't compare how strong it is or how weak it is in the past
but it could be similar to the way the Serbs kept Kosovo, not recently but let's say from
the part of an empire that there's always been a piece of land that's been wanted by
somebody else that they just couldn't get and Transnistria is one of those little slivers
of land that's quite uncontrollable.
That river that splits through it and all its arbitrary beauty separates this very strong
piece of land or very troubled piece of land that no one can govern or deal with.
That image was amazing to me because a person who was walking just along, he was from Transnistria
and he was walking around and every once in a while he would turn around and look at the
river in the places where he couldn't cross and it was just maybe half a mile and he could
have been somewhere else and he couldn't.
I patrolled with military personnel from different countries and that image is an American
and a next Bulgarian military personnel.
I traveled with them all through Transnistria and they were basically my guides and in that
particular image they stopped and rather the neighbor maybe spoke to him and they started
to converse together while the other was making sure that no other car was creating any kind
of havoc for us.
It's a very simple image and there's nothing more to it than what the real story is but
I remember a moment where there were three things happening, me taking that picture,
one person completely disconnected to what I was doing there, speaking to the neighbor,
while the other person is just watching this fleeting car going into the deep woods of
Transnistria and everybody got disconnected for a moment and I found out to be very beautiful.
If you were to ask me if I think about the image that I take before, the real answer
is yes, the other reality is I'm not really sure what I'm going to see but for that particular
image I spent hours driving with those people.
So I heard the wheels turn all the time on the gravel roads and we're driving slowly
because it's dangerous territory and we're silent and it's important and we're silent
and we're looking around and we're not speaking a lot and we know that we're being watched.
So when we're able to stop the car and get out and you hear and we're walking on these
old dirt roads and then all of a sudden this neighbor comes and grabs the attention of
one of the military personnel starts to speak to him, he'll turn and he'll start to speak.
That's all you hear, there's nothing else.
For a brief moment you'll hear a car driving up and that car is not supposed to be there
and it drives up and the other person is just watching making sure that the car just drives
on and I'm there.
If I were to write something or to describe that, all I would use is pure facts that who
the two people were, how old they were, what their jobs were, what they were doing there,
the car they drove, how long it took to get there, the speed they drove at, when they
stopped and why they stopped and why they started to do all of a sudden start speaking
to those people and then just to hear the slow turning of the wheels as this car drives
by.
I find that to be very important in storytelling because the more time you get to these details
the more time you're able to understand why that's relevant.
She was a direct victim from economic orphanage which is what they call over there.
So one person had to leave to Moscow and the other one had to stay in Moldova.
Some of them wanted to be with Transnistria and the other didn't so she stayed behind.
The person who left to Moscow was her father who was a drunk and eventually her mother
couldn't take care of the child anymore and she was left behind.
The camera that I use is an old rangefinder and it was a present from my late grandmother
and as irrelevant as it may seem it's something that I always use like a fountain pen and
I've never really changed that style and I've used other cameras and I've shot with other
cameras but whenever I really want to do something that's kind of meaningful I always use that
one.
There's something to be said for not being able to review your work right away so you
have to understand that while I'm doing this work I'm not developing any of it until it's
all done.
I spend all of my time in the place with the people and I shoot but I never ever look
once at what I'm doing until I'm gone.
I myself am a big footballer soccer fan and Transnistria has a football team called the
Football Club Sheriff and Sheriff is the one brand in Transnistria that you see everywhere
so gas stations, football club, supermarkets, everything, Sheriff, Sheriff, Sheriff, Sheriff.
And I wanted to go and see this game because it was apparently quite hard to go and get
into tickets because no one goes to see in this game it's pretty impressive and the people
who own the club are desperately trying to get into the Champions League and the way
they're doing it is by buying players so they bought all these players from Portugal, Brazil,
Africa and some from Russia and they live in these complexes and never leave these complexes
and they don't pay any taxes and they live pretty well and they're all in their 20s and
I wanted to go and meet those people and watch the game and see how the other half lives.
I was surprised to see this football pitch inside because it was the winter, it was February,
50 people, spectators, because all the games are free and the stadium is quite huge and
it's tall and it's quite beautiful and the light was streaming in and I just thought
it was stunning, it was like this vacant airplane hangar but also there's this ambulance in
the background, it's back from the 60s and there's two people there, those are the ambulance
driver and one medic and that's what they have when somebody gets injured.
So they have the car there but if somebody gets injured, I think there's a clinic directly
inside the place so I don't know why they need the car there and then the score line
1-0 sheriff too, I don't remember what the other team was but they win every game and
that's how they try to get into the Champions League, it's because you have to be top of
your league and since their league doesn't really exist, it's difficult.
This picture of a man at his desk is the communist leader in Transnistria, he is now 28 years
old and when I shot him he was 25 which I thought was absolutely stunning that being
that young he would be the leader of the communist party.
He believed with conviction that he was doing the right thing even though his country is
highly subsidized by Russia and he was 25, he spoke like somebody who was 40 and with
all the convictions of being 40 or even older than that believes everything is extreme conviction.
Where do you go from there if you're 25 and I just thought his youthful look and the communist
propaganda on the back and the flags I just thought was, for me it's chaotic beauty.
Transnistria is a lot of these no man's lands and there are places where you can't really
go and it's a bit dangerous to go to because there's these long stretches of roads and
you don't really know where they lead to and you see antennas everywhere and you know people
are actually looking like you're being spied on and this was in the middle of the winter
and this car was driving almost parallel to us, it was like we were driving in this triangle
and they were almost about to meet us and all the blur and all this beauty in this car came
and just by pure luck I took the camera out and I clicked, there's not two frames of that.
I love the fusion of all these trees and this stillness of this car and if you close your
eyes and you think about winter and the cold there's a stillness to that and I thought
that represented that very well.
The images that were exhibited at the Half-King were always part of a different entity, it
was always going to be a film in the end and I shot everything with that in mind.
So all the pictures are 24 by 36, there's no vertical images at all and I was telling
a story which meant that aside from the images you see there's sound everywhere and unlike
a diary from me being there and then leaving the place I had a pretty good idea of what
I wanted to get with the people I wanted to speak to, I wanted to speak to politicians,
I wanted to speak to the youth, I wanted to understand problems but also successes and
I wanted to narrate a nonlinear story about the just a fraction of time that I could share
with what it's like to be in Transnistria.
I don't see myself as a photo-generalist and I've never really been one, I've never
worked as one, that's important, I've published things in magazines before but maybe documentary
not necessarily photo-generalism, no one's ever called on me to take a portrait of this
person or to go to a location to describe or to document a conflict, I've never worked
that way.
I wouldn't call it dreaming but I certainly go and get into that state and I find a lot
of things beautiful or maybe very cinematic so there's this attached reality when I'm
there and when I meet the people and maybe that shows in the work that I do and I think
it might be maybe more heard by the way that I speak to people because you can hear that
it's not really making a documentary to share information, I'm just making something to share
a sensation.
I think it's kind of an identity in transition because at the mass level the Renkifal citizen
they could speak in this kind of Russian, it's their problem, it's their life actually,
their choice but if you want to be recognized as a part of elite you should learn Romanian,
you should learn Russian in order to be respected, you cannot stay in the middle.
