In my short stay in Romania, between Japan and France, I once again arrived in Bucharest.

I had decided to photograph the People’s House. I decided to start with the night pictures. So, in one summer, around  midnight, I’ve set up all my equipment in the square in front of the huge building, lit but lacking imagination.

Night image of The Palace of the Parliament, also known as The People’s House in the Cheauchesku’s era, in Bucharest, Romania.

I had conflicting feelings in front of the heaviest building in the world, known also as  one of the most expensive administrative buildings on Earth. It was huge and I kind of made me feel like an ant. My overall view of this giant was overwhelmed by the memory of the totalitarian-communist period in which it was built as a symbol of the nation’s suffering. And yet, for me that was the period, magnificent in anyone’s life, of my childhood and youth. It’s easy to understand that my feelings were confusing: the building was huge, imposing, well lit in the middle of an empty square, at night.

I was there as a traveling photographer trying to expose the subject in such a way that the resulting image can be useful to someone who would make use of it.

Night image of a car in front of the The Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest, Romania.

What and how to photograph? Similar to other occasions, I started with some adjusting photos of the subject, trying different positions, angles, settings, in this way “integrating” myself a bit in the atmosphere of the place. However, the resulting images were not specific enough to please me. I kept thinking of different ways to obtain an image which was original, unique. The sky, contrasting with the bright light of the building, was black. At one point I thought I’d add in postprocessing a Milky Way sky. During this time, a car and a few groups of people showed up in the Square. The typical reaction for a photographer, when a bunch o people “burst” into your frame, is to get angry ….. because it crumbles the imaginary house of cards you’ve carefully crafted or luckily discovered.

Night image of people in front of the The Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest, Romania. 

After this instinctual reaction, I started to analyze the newly created frame. And that lead me to find that due to the brightly lit building, the people and the car turned into shadows. And these shadows generated the fundamental element, the missing piece of the puzzle I was trying to solve before. I started photographing different frames in this new circumstances and this is how I managed to obtain a stream of good images. The images could very well be used in a tourist advertising material related to Bucharest ….. Traveller in Bucharest.