Tango

There is nothing peculiar about a young girl sitting alone at a table and drinking a coffee. It is a different story when you walk in a small city cafe on a rainy day and you see a 50-years old woman, with a rather shy look, wearing a black silk dress and drinking her coffee.

A young boy on the metro, carrying a huge teddy bear in his arms, an elegantly dressed man, walking a bit absent through the Museumsquartier in Vienna and eating an apple, a lonely woman in a café, they are people you randomly meet and  take one photograph of them, but you don't ask further questions because the context is not always proper. They are the strangers who tell their stories with a single glance.

Right next to the Museumquartier in Wien, a 60 000m2 cultural area, containing museums, Baroque buildings and fancy terraces with healthy food, some kids were hanging out. They were listening to System of a Down, fighting, combing hair, talking loud, smoking water pipe, but especially making out. As I was too shy to talk to them in German and they were shy to address me in English, we didn’t share many words. However, when two security guards showed up, they were nice enough to explain me that they had to move some meters away, because they were too close to a museum’s walls. Some of them told me their names, Luca, Nico, Nadine, Mimi, but most were quite reluctant about it. 

Two boys I met on the streets of Brasov, both of them studying music. The taller boy seemed  pretty self-confident and relaxed in front of the camera, while the other one looked like he was hiding in his big grey jacket and unconsciously making a statement on shyness.Even though shyness is most often regarded as a barrier to actively interacting with the world,  I also see it as something precious because it makes you turn your attention from your own person to the world and look more carefully at it.

Flea market, peddlers market, garage sale, yardsale, Flohmarkt, targ de vechituri.

I've always liked the flea markets, but I've always had a feeling of shame when I went there. 

Shame for indulging in the nostalgic, poetic atmosphere and in a way disregarding the reality

of a flea market, which in fact it's not that romantic.  In the flea markets from Berlin there were indeed a lot  of young bohemian people selling stuff for the fun of it, but in the flea markets from Bucharest most of the people are pretty poor. 

However, all those objects having belonged to various people and now brought together by accident have a certain poetry and their silent beauty.

As I was passing through the park, I noticed three girls. They were building a bed for their stuffed toy,  gathering flowers from the trees and petals from the ground. The parents might have been somewhere in the park, but for more than an hour they didn´t show up. One could also assume that the girls had escaped their homes in order to get there.

Even though this Sunday was windy and rainy and the Herastrau Park was almost empty, Cazimir, a French boy living in Bucharest, was riding his bike together with his dad and his brother.  He looked like an angel from a Renaissance painting or like the adolescent from Death in Venice. When I asked him his name, he whispered shyly and with a strong French accent, Cazimir.

On my one day trip to the mountains, I met these four girls. I was on the same train with the girl holding a picture. I don’t know if she’s in the picture or if it's some identical twin brother.  

The girls in the wood were having a small picnic. The idea of being photographed appeared a bit strange to them, but they immediately adopted classic feminine postures. 

I met the skinny girl in jeans on the streets of Busteni.