Horațiu Șovăială

He started photographing using black and white film at the end of his first year of college, for purely technical reasons. Limited technical resources divided the artist s work in two. He used black and white films in autumn and winter and color films in spring and summer. After graduation he worked as a photographer in an advertising studio. After living in Zürich for three years and travelling around Europe he has moved back to Bucharest in 2016, partly to further develop his own photographic practice, and partly due to the impression of attachment.  

In 2017 he self publish "Calea București", a book containing a series of 78 black and white images, arranged in a non-narrative, single image per full-spread sequence meant to question one`s own sense of belonging. The images are made in Romania, Switzerland and other western european locations, they do not always reveal their respective setting, but share a common visual language. The context of the series is his social and economical background in Romania at the time and his voluntary relocation to Switzerland, in Zürich. This contradictory relationshiop between image and memory then became the focus of his work. Upon further assessment one cannot help but notice that the city of Bucharest has a distinct set of qualities that go back and forth between attraction and contempt.