Shifting Grounds

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 with respectively 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.

Dani Ghercă’s photographic work is nurtured by this legacy and so is by the reverberations of the digital turn initiated in the 1990s and still finding its ways and theoretical base. During the first nine years of his production, from 2010 to 2019, Ghercă worked with analogic photography on long-term projects that documented Bucharest, making use of both the document and the snapshot aesthetics. Bucharest, Tunnels and Pipes and A Diagram of Utopia are exemplary of that. 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.

Housing stratification in contemporary Romania is a matter that appears transversally in Ghercă’s œuvre. Tunnels and Pipes presents daily scenes of a group of unhoused people that have made the sewer near Bucharest’s Central Station their home. The four largest administrative buildings of Bucharest that were built before 1989 and are currently nearly empty and unused are the subject of Four Houses. 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, emphasizing their scope.

Nowadays, he states that he no longer believes in the role of photography to document reality. In a movement towards a more abstract proposal, Ghercă inaugurated a shift in his work. His latest and ongoing series A Glimpse of Disconnection is made of aerial cityscapes from Paris, Berlin, London, Frankfurt, New York, Chicago, Dubai and Kuala Lumpur, although the locations are unidentifiable. Their interchangeability is key in the series and mainly attained through the use of Photoshop.

Playing with highlights and shadows to enhance some lines and obscure certain zones, Ghercă has created chameleonic images: they resemble abstractions, electronic circuit boards, urban plans and anonymous cityscapes. In addition, the large format prints are at times placed in a direction other than the regular upward position, favouring 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, and the disengagement from concrete reality provoked by our Big Tech dominated world system. The series is expanding, as are the artist’s horizons.