Stefana Daniela Brat is a photographer based in Romania. Her main areas of interest are architecture, abstract, analog, and urbex photography. The presented works are part of a project titled ‘Bucharest, Dissected.’
Brat is on a mission for harmony—”[…] As a photographer, I often seek to bring order in the visual chaos that currently is the architectural landscape of Bucharest city,” she explains. This approach stems from the human psyche and its inherent attraction to order and structure. Minimalistic and monochromatic vision helps to emphasize the contrast between old and new. Brat frames her photographs carefully, slicing the space into parts that serve her vision best.
She makes use of her experience and predilection for urbex photography to bring into the foreground the remnants of pre-Revolution Romanian architecture. In this ongoing project surrounding haunting Eastern European industrialism, she has been using an old FED-2 socialist rangefinder camera, which only enhances the element of authenticity.
The photographer has a keen and trained eye for framing, playing leisurely with shapes and geometry to capture the gritty, apparently bleak forms of Soviet architecture in a pursuit to bring their rigid beauty to life. She explains that she uses “geometrical shapes and the overlap of various layers as a visual representation of order and structure within that architectural landscape.”
“Where other people see ugliness and pieces that don’t make sense, I see various geometrical shapes and slices that in fact do convey a certain structure; once you separate them from the bigger picture, you carefully observe them and bring them closer to the viewer’s eye,” Brat adds.
Read our “Aberration” issue in full
The 31 artists featured in RAWGUE. Magazine’s 5th issue stray from the expected, taking untrodden paths, contemplating imperfection, solitude in its many forms, and the ongoing process of self-acceptance. Through shifting perspectives, their works explore what it means to look at oneself from the outside, as if through broken glass.
We’re a team of writers using our craft to spotlight art in its most honest form. RAWGUE. started as a bi-monthly editorial experiment where each issue’s theme is dictated by the submitted work, thus removing editorial bias from the equation and preserving a more raw approach. We focus on all forms of poetry: written, photographed, painted, drawn, and filmed.
