Loredana Nemes: beautiful. Sibiu 2002–2013

Loredana Nemes was born in Sibiu in 1972 and had to leave the city at fourteen. The book’s declared 2002–2013 span frames this later photographic encounter with Sibiu, and they carry the weight of that distance: eighty-one pictures in which the Romanian town appears as a child might keep it — streets handed over to play, bare legs and a small tricycle holding out the promise of an endless summer, adults lingering outdoors to gossip with neighbours, the apparently untouched natural hinterland absorbed into an apparently limitless leisure. These are images of a hometown and, at the same time, images of how memory holds a town.

Nemes does not let the idyll speak for itself. She sets her photographs beside poetic texts of her own, and the texts register the abruptness of a childhood cut short by flight from socialist Romania. Internalized images answer photographic ones; the colours of childhood and imagination enter the grey zones the pictures record — the blood of a slaughtered pig, the shades of gummy bears, the stubborn fringe of a rug, burned mother’s milk.

Hatje Cantz issued the book in 2013: 136 pages, eighty-one photographs, half cloth, 250 by 275 millimetres, texts printed in German, English and Romanian, with Alexandra Zöller credited for the design; photographs and texts alike are credited to Nemes.

For a collector the interest lies in the span the title declares rather than in a single view, and in the trilingual printing, which places Romanian beside German and English within one volume. What Nemes asks of her photographs is not proof of a place but a double record of it: the town as it stands and the town as it was internalised. Both are present, and neither is permitted to settle the other. The book’s weight is that it keeps those two states of a city in one pair of hands.

From the perspective of her childhood, the photographs by Loredana Nemes (*1972 in Sibiu, Romania) tell of the beauty of her hometown and a life rooted in tradition: in one of the images in the beautiful series, bare feet and legs and a small tricycle hold the promise of an endless summer. Children play in the streets; adults also spend a great deal of time outdoors, gossiping with neighbors, encountering each other and the apparently untouched natural hinterland with a sense of infinite leisure. Nemes, who had to leave her beloved Sibiu at the age of fourteen, juxtaposes the photographic idylls with poetic texts that impart a sense of the kinds of abrupt changes that must have occurred in her life when she fled socialist Romania. Internalized images are contrasted with photographic ones, adding the colors of childhood and imagination to the gray zones—the blood of a slaughtered pig, the colors of gummy bears, the stubborn fringe of a rug, or burned mother’s milk.
 
This event is supported by the Robert Bosch Stiftung with funding from the Border Crosser program.

Designed by: Alexandra Zöller
Illustriert von: Loredana Nemes
Texts by: Loredana Nemes
German, English, Romanian
October 2013, 136 Pages , 81 Photos
half cloth
250mm x 275mm
ISBN:978-3-7757-3653-4

Publisher page editorial text:
From the perspective of her childhood, the photographs by Loredana Nemes (*1972 in Sibiu, Romania) tell of the beauty of her hometown and a life rooted in tradition: in one of the images in the beautiful series, bare feet and legs and a small tricycle hold the promise of an endless summer. Children play in the streets; adults also spend a great deal of time outdoors, gossiping with neighbors, encountering each other and the apparently untouched natural hinterland with a sense of infinite leisure. Nemes, who had to leave her beloved Sibiu at the age of fourteen, juxtaposes the photographic idylls with poetic texts that impart a sense of the kinds of abrupt changes that must have occurred in her life when she fled socialist Romania. Internalized images are contrasted with photographic ones, adding the colors of childhood and imagination to the gray zones—the blood of a slaughtered pig, the colors of gummy bears, the stubborn fringe of a rug, or burned mother’s milk.
 
This event is supported by the Robert Bosch Stiftung with funding from the Border Crosser program.

Publisher source ↗