framing and other options
about context II
The landscape resists precise classification. It cannot be fully described through foreground and background, center and periphery, or other stable hierarchies. This difficulty becomes more evident in familiar places, where proximity and repetition make the landscape harder to register. It carries a dual function: it accommodates subjective experience while also operating as a social expression of authority and ownership.
From the position of a practitioner working with the photographic medium, one dimension of the landscape relates to the concrete encounter with nature and territory. Yet the camera — and the frame it imposes — mediates this encounter and alters its immediacy. The photographic image becomes a constructed form shaped by position, repetition, and the limitations of the medium. I work with the image as a mediated document, without assigning metaphor the status of truth.
The recent alternation between domestic isolation, brief intervals of movement, and the continuous flow of information generated by the war in Ukraine has reconfigured the perception of proximity and routine. This context led to a renewed attention to the small universe of the house, the daily routes, and the familiar markers that once offered predictability.
Photographing symbols of mobility, and then re‑photographing them, became a way of registering everyday paths and considering possible new ones. These gestures reflect ongoing adjustments of priorities and uncertainties within a shifting environment.
Teodor Bădărău, June 2022, Iaşi, Romania