It is 2015; our children have learned to stand on their own two feet and all three have left the parental home. I have enjoyed practicing my profession as a teacher for years, but what has been bubbling beneath the surface for a very long time bursts out with force and makes me start a photography course at the Fotoacademie in Amsterdam. It will turn out to be an intense and bumpy journey, a search for myself and for the photographer within me. In 2018 I graduate with honors.

I am a storyteller who uses both still and moving images as well as text. I like to make long-term engagements with my subjects, immerse myself in their lives and explore the space the main characters occupy in life and how everyone within their respective spaces tries to make the best of it. What does it mean to be autonomous, to beabsorbed into those spaces with rules, relationships and obligations, while determining your own life? I photograph with an unsentimental, loving eye. There is no softness for the sake of softness when it comes to love. In fact, love is truth; defining boundaries, accepting where the pain is, and understanding the incomprehensible. I allow myself to be enriched by the other and try to understand my own life and history this way.

Meanwhile my first book ‘Am viață – I have life’ has been published and I’ve won several prizes including Zilveren Camera 1st prize Portrait Series, the SO Student Award 2019 and Female in Focus 2019 Award by British Journal of Photography 1854. My work has been shown at a number of photo festivals and exhibitions including Fotofestival Naarden 2019 and United Photo Industries Gallery in Brooklyn New York.