Different Readings of Dani Ghercă's Work

Ghercă gives an interesting turn to the genre of the photographic cityscape. By underexposing the shot and literally turning the photograph 90° clockwise, the city becomes an abstracted entity defined by interlacing lines. With this abstraction comes the idea of the city as a mere gathering of buildings: there are no people visible, the streets seem abandoned, all human activity has ceased to be. The white lines, etched into the image, embrace empty volumes. The image shows the borders of the buildings, their outlines, but doesn’t reveal anything about their surface, about their texture and structure. They encompass black voids. The end result is a black but also bleak vision of the contemporary city as an inhumane maze.

All this works together to make these images strong metaphors for our current age. Its emptiness resonates with our past experience during the pandemic while at the same time it seems to foretell also something sinister about our immediate future. As such, it could be seen as a premonition of what would happen if we can’t control the current climate crisis and the accompanying sixth mass extinction of species. The empty streets, the harsh lines, the black voids, then could be seen as depicting an inhabitable environment where everything human has disappeared from. The city still stands, but as an empty shell, as a meditative ruin, a remnant of what once was, a token of a previous and now extinct civilization.

Another element that I found fascinating in his work, another layer if you will, is that these affects are created by using visual strategies that are only available in photography. By using the photographic system against itself, against what it is supposed to do, the images again stress the non-human aspect of the photographic procedure. This gritty vision of the city can only be achieved by photographic means, by putting an apparatus between us and the world that gives its own mechanic and unforeseen interpretation of it. More than anything else, it is this non-human mediation that guides the viewer in understanding this image as a clinical, detached view of the contemporary city.

Photography always operates on the uneasy borderline between the abstract and the real: it is less real than many people believe, and it is more abstract than most would admit.