Ok, the biggest drama here is that my original post is gone. And with it the thread of facts that was holding the individual images together. You think I write these blog entries for you?! Well yes, I do :):):) but not only – actually I write them for myself just as well. As a reminder. I still have thousands of pictures from that ten days in May that I spent on the workshop with Antonin Kratochvil in Transylvania but … names? Places? Numbers? All gone with the post. So yesssss … I AM upset a little (very). I will have to change the way I document my personal stuff – just in case this happenes again.
I remember I was totally curious about Romania before getting there … The workshop was called “The Lost Villages of Transylvania” and during the first days of orientation and introduction by our guides we could see what that meant: a disappearing world. People between anguish and hope – with changes that come too fast for most of them to grasp. There was a foreshadowing in the faces that I met, that reminded me of faces I saw in Berlin after the opening of the wall – I was there when the wall came down in Berlin, and the faces I met ate me up from the inside. Especially the ones from the older generation – whilst the younger ones were partying the elderly had already collected life experience enough to know that this was not going to happen without a greater sacrifice … In Transylvania I saw this expression again, but differently than in Germany I saw it on younger faces too. I wanted to capture that, I decided. But where could I do that without being noticed? In a train, I told myself … passing all the shut down industries, all the signs that sang the happy-Europe-song … In a train, where I could press the shutter of my old and worn down point&shoot without anybody taking note.
So much for my plans.
They were actually reasonable. Most of the other workshop participants were in Roma villages and needing guides and translators for that. We did not have enough helpers and I would either have to stand in line or do something where I did not need translators.
And so I started with this (along with 3 backup ideas – just in case)
As the train rides took up much of my day I soon had to cancel my parallel essays – there was no time for them and a good first day (which was the only good day the “foreshadow”-essay had) falsely convinced me that it was the path to follow.
The next day came and all of the sudden I was waiting for hours on the empty stations only to get into empty trains … Where was everyone? I was doing something wrong and I had no way to ask because I had not met anyone up to that point who could speak English. I was hasseling with my Portuguese to understand what the matter was, and was just about to change the name of my essay into “Empty Train Stations of Transylvania” when things changed again. From the afternoon of day 3 on I was not alone in the trains anymore. Interestingly enough, I started to always see the same faces, even if I was travelling ceaselessly back and forth between stations. And the associated bodies were sitting right next to me. So it became impossible for me to proceed with the “foreshadow”-essay. Especially because everybody else in the train seemed to be acutely aware of what was going on. Silence reigned but eyes were eager.
I did the only thing I thought I could do at that moment without giving up. I started to take pictures “under cover”, meaning: while I pretended to have a look at whatever I had shot already on my little monitor – making the appropriate faces to it – I was actually taking pictures through my fingers. From the outside it looked like I was covering the lens – and I was, partially at least. This way I was watching those who were watching me. Sounds fair, does it not?
As Antonin Kratochvil insisted in doing the whole final edit of the essays alone, and I was not really sure if he would go along with my last approach, I presented “foreshadow” as well as “trains /stations” and “under cover”. His edit? He decided to show all three of them.
Nice one!
