Aurel Manea Photography

Just another streetphoto series

“Hey, long time no see. I hear you’re into photos now, I meet up with your brother a couple of days ago, told me all about it”

Sometimes I meet people on the street.  Strangers. They come to me with a friendly look and ask me how I’ve been, what’s up.
Ipretend to know them. I know I should and there is a bit of familiarity to them, but I cannot place it in time and space. I go along for a while.  I ask them how they are, what life brought to them  and hoping this way they might say something to make me remember.
They are neighbors from where I grew up, school or high school colleagues , long time friends, kids with whom I spent a whole childhood. All of them obliterated out of memory and out of existence.
My look betrays me anyway, I give up and ask them details. Sometimes lost pieces of memory come together to form an image that maybe is real but cold and unfamiliar, like a movie I saw a long time ago that got stuck yet a movie that never meant anything to me . But most of the times everything gets mixed up and the faces end up on other persons in muffled images that have no coherence and cannot be related to anything at all. And why should they, there’s no longer a timeline, there is no main story to relate them to, it was the first to go when the road collapsed behind and around. Life is but a short moment cough between two unknowns and the unwritten future in all it’s possible combinations more clear and vivid than the lost past.
Nostalgia is dead, the mind struggles in vain .
I offend by not remembering .I  should feel sorry for that. But I don’t, I do not know who they are . I excuse myself, I gieve a short explanation  of how and why and walk away with the promise of maybe a beer sometimes soon.
But I forget about that anyway.

Alexandra Nichita .

There is a place I know behind the Sun. It’s the place where we can start again.
One road that leads to it, paved with remains of  today and the ashes of tomorrow . It’s my road alone to walk.

I keep having this feeling that there’s something very wrong with this country. It keeps killing the souls of the people, and sometimes I am in a tram and all I see is empty life-like shells . And not because of poverty, but I think it’s because of  the basis of how this society works (or doesn’t ), the way a family becomes a family here, the  parents, etc. Before you even reach adulthood you no longer have a will, a soul or a mind of your own. You just exist, rich or pour.

note : taken with the nex-5.

I’m gonna write a little “subjective review” regarding this little toy. Thing is I got tired of missing shots just because I cannot carry my camera with me. It’s just too big ! So I had to find myself a dslr-like camera with a large sensor and interchangeable lens. And only choice was between the nex-3 or 5 and a micro four thirds camera (but the sensor is too small for my taste). Here are a couple of shots made in the first day of tests using the 18-55 kit lens (until I will buy a prime). Anyway, first impressions are good.