Floors Apart: An Interview with Bogdan Gîrbovan

What is it about 10/1 that still fascinates people 17 years on, do you think?

I have gathered many layers of answers and questions, mostly from people who were touched by my work. One of the beautiful evolutions of the work has been that it seems to answer questions for people and organisations about how people live in apartment blocks. Just like a piece of classical music (let's say Bach, which I like) or like a good book that still manages to impress after many years, I am glad that 10/1 manages to touch on the ideas of convenient housing, domesticity of living, and the safety and privacy of the home in the collective memory. It has done this for quite a while, despite the fact that photography nowadays is consumed at an impressive speed.

The photographs taken are of your neighbours and their homes within your building at that time. Can you describe what prompted you to begin the series? What interested you?

Yes, the photos are taken in the apartment block where I lived, on the 10th floor, and the series includes images of the neighbours' houses vertically. The middle apartment in the arrangement of the five apartments on each floor was a studio, the smallest apartment (about 32 square meters), which included a small hallway leading to the main room, the bathroom on the right of the hallway and a small kitchen reached from the room. I started with my studio, a kind of self-portrait, then I continued with the studio on the ninth floor and I eventually reached the first floor.

In my third year of my bachelor's degree – towards the end if I remember correctly – we had to submit to the head of the department a synopsis – a draft, an idea – of what we wanted to do for our final thesis. At that time I was very fond of interior photography. I was reading an article on spatial anthropology Naming The Rooms written by Maria Vittoria Giuliani that fuelled my curious spirit about how people adapt their homes. I was pretty determined that for my final thesis I would photograph interiors of my neighbours' apartments so I submitted a draft, rather uninspiringly named Photographs of the Neighbors, to the school. I didn't have a clear concept, I didn't know who to start with (the relations with the neighbours were not the closest – we respected each other, we greeted each other but we didn't sit around talking). We were not a community in that 10-storey building with five apartments on each floor.

I started my fourth year in college, my final year, and I still hadn't managed to outline anything on the project – just some self-portraits in my own space, from several angles and promises from some neighbours. And as it happens in life, when I got tired of searching or convincing, Mrs Bita, the neighbour below me (on the ninth floor), came and asked me to help her. She had a door that creaked very loudly and it needed to be taken off its hinges, so I instantly accepted the offer to go into her home. This was the trigger to start the series – when I walked into a space identical to my own but which was totally different.

Already in the back of my mind I had the idea of going down to the first floor through these studio flats: the play between identity and identical, the architecture of the space as a convenient dwelling (being only one room, it was very cheap to live in). Many ideas were running through my mind in those few minutes while I was greasing Mrs Bita's door. In the picture of the ninth floor at Mrs. Bita's, the oil used for the door is on the table. You can see that I took the picture right after I finished the task.

As for my interests, they were manifold, starting with the idea of identicality and identity, that repetition from 10th floor to first floor, right through the whole history of photography, or at least a fairly consistent part of it.

Can you describe the building where you were all living and how it relates to the typical typology of buildings in Bucharest?

It was a 10-storey apartment building in a neighbourhood, not very central but not very peripheral, built and put into use in 1967. The building was a Soviet pattern of apartments built in the ‘golden age’ in which people were moved from rural areas to cities to support industrialisation.

The information and statistics found in 2008 was that 60 to 70 per cent of the blocks in Bucharest had this purpose. Bucharest – this 'little Paris' – still has a wonderful historical centre and many buildings with great architecture, but most of the inhabitants lived and still live in Soviet-style blocks. A strange combination.

What struck you in examining these contrasting versions of the same space?

The arrangement of an intimate space, a home, says a lot about the person who lives there, the decor 'does not lie' so to say – it shows you as you are. It defines you as a person, as a character. But the inanimate things don't impress me, no matter how sensational or how different the spaces may be. It's people who get into that sphere, so what struck me most was the fact that it was the most difficult to collaborate with young people. One of them even asked me for money, and yes, I gave him 50 lei – I'll let you discover which one it is. The money is in the photograph.

Mrs Bita, the neighbour below me (...) came and asked me to help her. She had a door that creaked very loudly and it needed to be taken off its hinges, so i instantly accepted the offer to go into her home. This was the trigger to start the series – when i walked into a space identical to my own but which was totally different.

What story do you think these images tell?

On one hand these images are a deconstruction of a block's middle section, from the 10th floor to the first floor, and on the other hand they are a horizontal reconstruction, where the identical frame (I'm talking about the type of photographic framing) and the identical architecture (identical floor structure) meet the identity of the individual who is 10 times different.

I think the series tells 11 stories. It's the big story where you can look at the ensemble, seeing all 10 at once, where the social mix is wholesome through its aesthetics and the footprint left by the individual, or you can look at the story cell by cell and navigate through 10 different worlds, trying to make a psychological profile of the person who lives there.

What subjects and themes are you drawn to in your work and why?

When I was an MA student, a curator and art critic told me that my style should be called 'Applied Social Photogenie'. My practice explores images that break out of the patterns of contemporary aesthetic over-saturation. I like to categorise my subjects through personal narratives and explore the relationship between people and nature in the simplest way possible.

What led you to photography?

In 1998, when I was in my third year of high school, I went on a school trip to the north of Romania, where we visited and travelled for about a week. A few days after returning, many of my fellow students were exchanging postcards: 10 by 15 centimetre photos of this trip, much like Instagram now. And I not only didn't appear in the pictures, but I didn't have many of the memories. This was very strange for me, not because I didn't appear in the pictures, but because I could not exchange memories with the others (like I had nothing to post).

There were also a lot of images that I simply didn't remember, and that contributed to my ambition to get a camera. I realised that I have problems with my photographic memory, as I couldn't remember many places, it seemed like I walked with my eyes closed. So I started taking pictures with a very cheap point-and-shoot camera, on black and white Azo Mures film (a Romanian brand of film) and I would develop them at home in the bathroom and enlarge them on black and white paper. In 2000, when I finished high school, I was the only one who was still doing photography, not colour photos everyone took to the lab, but black and white, and I had my own darkroom at home. I was the happiest young man in the world.

I studied mathematics, physics and computer science in high school and it took me three years to find myself, to see what I like to do. I failed to get closer to anything as concrete as university studies but I was still taking pictures. I even advanced – I had a Canon eos 1000 camera, quite modern, but to my shame I didn't know about the existence of the Photography Department at the Bucharest National University of Arts. A good friend told me that this school existed, and from 2003 to 2004 I learned everything they required in the curriculum as well as I could. It was a complex exam, with charcoal drawing, an interview, photography dossier and practical photography. I wanted so much to go to this school that I prepared very well, so out of 14 places I secured the seventh place.

Since 2004 and until my last days on this planet I will do art photography. I hope to evolve with it and leave behind what every creator wants: a timeless body of works that emit a state, an emotion – something that makes you think.

girbovan.ro | @bogdan_girbovan