A very old picture. While walking thought the streets of, once, impossible to reach cities across the world, I was thinking: what would I photograph if I could magically transport myself in the same places where I grew up and began to open “the eyes of my mind”?    Several opportunities occured for me to return home for a while and I tried to give an answer. And therefore I went out for a walk on those streets to (re)discover them, following the breadcrumbs of my memories of youth. But there was a major difference: my current situation was completely different from back in the day. I was facing a very interesting and somewhat recurring paradox: while being in my birth country I had been dreaming of other places and once reaching them, I began to dream of being back again in the places I had left. Maybe I just wanted to see how I perceive them now after my initial dreams ended up seeding newer dreams, on and on.

In the meantime, I may have changed a bit. Traveling around the world taught me the important lesson of “discovering and seeing” all sorts of “things” that then, through my eyes and the camera lens, turned into images. The “engine” for generating images of new places was probably the astonishment multiplied by the joy of discovering them.

I didn’t belong to those places, I was just peeling of the veil covering them and trying to make an imagistic synthesis of what I was seeing and living, meanwhile spicing everything with the little grains of the salt-of-stories discovered, read or told by my new acquaintances, the locals.

In my native places the situation was completely different: this time I was the “friend” who knew the history of the place. Now, that place doesn’t look exactly like my memory is trying to remember. I had to put into the picture what I knew about the place and combine it with what I could see now. And what I was seeing was clearly influenced by everything I had discovered in the new places, as a keen observer. I could notice differences, I could feel old stories that were the strength and the historical scaffold of the place, I was discovering imperfections….in fact, time had inexorably passed. How could I express this passage of time… ?

“The Museum Square” in Cluj Napoca, Romania

These were my thoughts behind the camera when, after about 5 years living of in Japan, I’ve arrived again in the Museum Square in Cluj. I wanted to show the passage of time. Now, it was different than when I discovered it in detail. It was more modern and with all imperfections, it was closer to the new discovered places. But for me, it was still bearing some features from before these transformations. The time had passed … how could I suggest this in an image made now?

I tried all sorts of ideas: weird perspectives, details, different moments and aspects of weather, yet, nothing seemed to work. Until a split second,  when the image birthed itself. An old man with a cane exited a building and slowly, limping, he walked toward me. That man, with his age and attitude, reflected the story of this old place of mine. His appearance was the last piece of the puzzle, perfectly completing the story of the Museum Square and therefore, all parts fell into this picture, like a liquid terminator self-assembling from parts coming from scattered chucks of space and time.