My Substack friends are used to me writing in Romanian, which is my native language. Today, I will make a rare exception and write in English; I’ll tell you why in a second.
Juliette Mansour is one of the people I admire most here, and I have been following her work right from the moment I came across her work. The subtle manner in which she combines words and photography is mesmerizing and always inspirational, for me it goes to the point where many times it leaves me thinking “damn, I wish I had thought of this, I wish I had written about this”. On top of this, she has started a series of conversations with other photographers, where the interviewee is invited to discuss their creative approach to photography, the process of thinking a project, and the way they struggle to conquer the space between eye to lens and further to the screen and printer. I am honored to be her guest in this installation of Lens to Lens.
We have discussed about how a project needs to be imagined, left behind, reopened, modified, and sometimes abandoned. We talked journaling, meditation, frustration and compulsion to finish what has been lingering on the mind for days or months (maybe years) We talked about intention and muses. We talked as if on opposite sides of a mirror, from Romania across the Atlantic.
Thank you, Juliette, and I welcome all the new and older readers to sit back and enjoy our conversation.
Juliette’s Substack is here. Please take the time to look around and definitely subscribe to her newsletter.
-ends
Thank you Crina for joining me. I hope others are as inspired as I was by your work...and thanks for making an exception in English!
In my time teaching writing, and even now as a critical reader, one of the great flaws in writing can be summed up as: "too much of the scaffolding still present". Meaning, more work needs to be done to hide the framework and show only the words that it supports. I hadn't thought of this in the context of photography, but it makes perfect sense. Crina's approach is interesting to me, a way of working I can only imagine myself doing in documentary work. She has given me food for thought.