In 2013, after a few years working as a commercial photographer and spending long hours in front of the computer retouching images, often ending up with a backache, I started practising yoga and decided to leave London searching for a “reality that does not need retouching”. Before the journey, I received a providential gift from a stranger: a bag full of expired film rolls that I took with my analogue camera to Italy, India, and Bali. During this trip, I instinctively started to shoot multiple exposure images, feeling a deep sense of liberation arising from overlapping different perspectives on the same film frame. Thus, the series Eyescapes was spontaneously born. The inner conflict that I experienced in my personal life, growing up between two opposite realities, the Romanian communist and the Italian capitalist ones, without feeling entirely at home in any of them, experiencing a constant feeling of unsettledness and desire to escape, finds resolution in my work through the creation of a third visual reality that synthesizes my conclusions of what is good of two or more different perspectives. Seeing the images after the film was developed, I realized that I shot these photographs in the moments when I was feeling overwhelmed by the beauty of the place I was in and in which I was trying to anchor myself forever, somehow “boxing” myself between the layers containing the main details that would attract my attention in those specific moments. By looking outside through the camera lens, I saw my inner world, found peace and realized that for me, home is where there is time to seek and contemplate the beauty arising from overlapping different perspectives.

About

Ioana Vrabie is an international photographer born in Transylvania. Ioana Vrabie grew up in Tuscany, Italy. Being a mix between two opposite cultures, her original communist one and her new capitalistic one, propelled her to travel extensively and develop an inquisitive approach towards life. She had to search for her truth and identity by questioning what was right and wrong from an early age. She showed an early inclination towards writing, arts and crafts, winning a few local prizes. At sixteen, her grandfather gifted her with a Zorki 6 (the Eastern European version of Leica II), and her love for photography started. However, only in her late twenties, she decided to study photography at the University of Arts London after travelling the world as a flight attendant for almost a decade. She worked as a digital commercial photographer and at Photofusion, a camera club that kept her love for analogue alive. The inner conflict that she experienced in her personal life transpires into her work: two different and overlapped realities are mirrored in her photographs, representing a third reality she’s always been looking for. After living in Romania, Italy and UK and travelling around the world, she is currently based in Barcelona, Spain.