Aurel Manea Photography

I now have around 11.000 fans on Facebook. Deserved or undeserved they are there so I owe a couple of answers to questions asked and some additions of my own that I find much more important. So here is a set of rules:

• There is no secret. It’s trial and error, experimentation, experience, looking at others. It’s play and if you don’t really like the game you should not play it. There is no secret about anything, once you start looking for a secret you are on a wrong track.
• Everything I learn I learned myself . I have never ever seen a tutorial, I just played and looked at what others do. Don’t ask so many questions, experiment as much as you can and watch others .
• Camera does not matter that much. Do not ask about the camera referring to it like a messiah of photography. Yes, it is important but it’s mostly  about the light, the experience, the eye, the moment, chance, the subject, the mood, the feelings, the effort to go someplace strange and deserted, and last but not least the post processing. Many times it’s just a boring photo you took some years ago you did not find any potential to it. At some point, in some mood it will say something to you and learn what to do with it. All my recent photos are actually very old, many of my them taken with an ancient 300d camera and kit lens. You will not know what photo was made with what, maybe only the lens if you are an expert in DoF.
• I am not a professional photographer. I don’t make money out of it. Money may come some day but if you try to do something for the money you will fail. Even if you do make money you will still fail in the end.
• My images may be good, but mostly aesthetic. There are thousands of photographers (and artists in general also) out there that don’t get enough exposure because of the uneducated public. If you like photography, if you really do you will give it the respect it needs, look it up and try to understand what you don’t yet. What you find boring and does not speak to you may speak some day with a voice much louder than anything else. Taste, senses evolve, have the patience  and let them evolve. What I do is what I call bridge photography. It’s not cheap, it’s good taste but not extraordinary. That means that anybody can enjoy it  but it is rarely truly art.
• Good artists rarely get to be known and what society as a whole perceives as valuable art is usually just shit (with enough exceptions). It’s a somehow funny set of rules that imposes value based on hype & media taking advantage of, yes, the uneducated public. For almost an year I have been recommending Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop as the most important example of how anything art/value-related works in society. See it, laugh at it, laugh at yourself and the world you live in, learn a lesson, apply it. Make the world a little better by not being a dummy.
• Be an educated public about anything. You will not find much on tv or anything mainstream.
• Question yourself, accept your mediocrity, it’ the only way one can learn. And I don’t mean that in the way of “oh my god,that guy is so good and I’m such a noob”, but accept the fact that you may put the wrong questions and what you percieve as good might not be. Always, always learn.
• Watch Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop

Alexandra Nichita .

This is me. I weigh 80 kg, I’m 1.82 meters tall, 28 years old yet only alive for 4. I have birthmarks on my right hand and a scar on my face from when a dog bit me long time ago. For one year I have been wearing long unattended hair and before that short shaved. People who don’t really know me would label me as introverted depressed person with weird habits . Those who do  would say I am somehow bipolar, jumping from a state of complete and utter depression to one  over-extroverted. I usually don’t get out of my boring daily routine but when I do, I do it all the way. When something new comes along my path I take my chance with it. I am usually very open minded about anything and like to put people in situation where I challenge their predefined patterns of thinking about taboo subjects. I like to argue . I like drugs and never say no to them .They played a crucial part in my life with the new perspectives and viewpoints they brought. I like music. I like the girl I love, and I know in my heart that there is a high chance when she will be gone forever beyond hope I will die. I spend my nights thinking about that and about perspectives but find none. I like and do a lot of things, I make enough money and one without knowing would otherwise say I have nothing to complain about. They would be wrong.

I like to photograph, I carry all the time with me a medium backpack that contains my camera ,3 lenses, an external hard drive, a cleaning kit, a green laser pointer, a high precision scale, a portable microscope, an extra card and battery, condoms, a cable and a pen. The backpack is custom adapted so it fits my own needs , the padding removed and made so that it is thin and I have the fastest access to the camera without taking off the backpack. Estimated time-to-photo  : 4 seconds. If I see something I want to make sure I capture it. I do my best to facilitate travel, I have everything organized, I know how I’m going to carry all items in the plane and be as lite as possible.I spend a lot of time organizing everything in perfect order. There was a time when I was always in some place, on a volcano, around some glacial lake or in some European city with a camera . I enjoyed the strange and new feelings that each place made me live, the beauty of the new. And for that time it replaced the other feelings, the ones of desperation, it managed to fill the void .
I tough I was going to spend the rest of my life traveling and photographing. I loved each place, each new experience, each  breath of new air alike.

Not anymore.

You’re running high, I’m running low
It’s time to leave, I have to go
I took my chance, perhaps I lost
Or maybe things are as they must
This castle made of sand will fall
And sand that’s left shall bury all
Undream this dream and start again
A search so seemingly in vain

The wind is blowing things unknown
Birds start to sing a backwards song
All life in genes withdraws and dies
All things undoing, breaking ties
My heart is glowing in the dark
I see you first then loses  spark
With flatline beats continues on
And then it’s dark, and then it’s gone.

- So. How was it ?
- Interesting I guess. A tad too long, the second part was so repetitive that I thought it will never end.
- Wasn’t that the whole point ?
-Yes, I know, but it just went on forever. And first I tough I was watching a soap opera and then it was combination of  Kaufman , Jarmush and a bit of Woody. Fresh approach yes, but maybe overdone.
-You know they say the director came drunk many times on the set. He would re-take the same scene hundred of times, exhaust the actors beyond recognition until they looked and behaved the way he wanted. Sometimes he didn’t even come to the set so the actors would film themselves by reflex. The last part was shot entirely without him.
-Experimental, eh ?
-Quite so. Were there a lot of people ?
-Not really. Most  were friends of the main actor and people he invited for free in the street. Many of them did not even know what they came for. Some were playing on their phones, others making out and some were just enjoying the image with headphones on. Very  few really watched .
-Why did you go  ?
-Well I heard it was supposed to be interesting and and  I was intrigued by the mixed reviews. That and the fact that the director chose to screen it only once and then burn the rolls.
-How did you feel about the main character and his “romance” ?
-Strange, like he no longer found a place in the world and sought  it in the only place he knew and made sense anymore, where it all began and all rest ended, in her.Like a broken record. And the more he struggled the deeper in his own situation got stuck. There was the bar scene where the friend said: “You know you give this image of such a melodramatic bullshitter that people can’t take you seriously. They can’t see the problems, they can’t see how deep they go and the nature of the damage” . The character and story  was much more complex than the poster and tag line said. Quite misleading indeed, that tag line .
-And her ?
-Well I can’t be sure if she was even real or not. The way she changed the look and expression, the way she faded from scene to scene. The script doesn’t let the viewer see the real person behind that very often. Even when we do see her, we don’t really. She herself acts different in the context, reacting towards him in seemingly unnatural ways. And the movie is made so we perceive her like he does. I think that’s the whole point. And I also think it may have all been a metaphor for a semi-purgatory.
-For both ?
-Like I said, she was very ambiguous so there was no way to tell. Perhaps. For him, yes. That or a very weird situation .
-What about the twist in the end ?
-I don’t know if it can be called a twist. May have been the only natural way to end the movie.
…………….
And a very unrelated photo. Or a photo with a very unrelated text.

Calm yourself, old boy. Breathe in. Breathe out. Find the reason. Remember. Retrace.
Follow your footsteps in the past. See them fade away, changing shape and pace as if they constantly belonged to someone else. They did. You died a long time ago, you have died many times and you’ve been reborn as many. You woke up today a stranger from the world and from yourself.
All you know now is that beautiful place she once created in the future with the whisper of a few words, the place you blindly walk towards, the place that bears her name. A place so beautiful that its distant echoes go through your dreams when you sleep, making it real as if you had already been there, a long time ago, perhaps in another life. You can finally rest there, for the first time in your life.

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.

Yesterday I started putting wordplays that came to my head in a document on the phone, walking around the city. Slowly before night this came out. It’s unfinished, may never be, unpolished and might as well be an experiment of realtime poetry that changes in time.

Poem for an unwritten ending

The sun that is setting in darkness reveals
All things mention worthy that time pass conceals
All half mended scars, all wide open wounds
The kind that a lifetime won’t make one to lose.
And should there be death to break the dark seal
The wounds they go deeper thus death shall not heal.

Oh devil where are you, oh brother of pain
T’is me who has suffered, t’is you who will gain.
Together we danced in the pale light of moon
And gone was your presence before the day’s noon
And that which you’ve taken, The things I have sold
Will be with you always and not be returned.
For what better reason for selling a soul
Than sweet lover’s mirage to which I was drawn.

So foolish have I been to love and not hold
A thing of such beauty, too good and too cold
For beauty’s illusive as beauty should be
Convulsive, compulsive, impulsive is she.
I pity the fools that are caught in her net
Forever imprisoned, forever regret
Forever to know what all is worth for
Forever to crave it and have none at all.
The longest of reaches would not get them near
And near should they go to, would make disappear.
Correct are the love laws but fair they are not
The more that you crave it, the more have you not.

Your body is heaven, your eyes are a bliss
Your voice is the music that can light an abyss
Your warm gentle touch that never I’ve felt
Would make coldest winters forever to melt.
How i wanted to be in your dreamy embrace
To die in your arms as I stared in your face
No price high enough be and and no sacrifice
But none were to give you and none would suffice.
You’re not for the taking, not for those that crave
And not for the lost ones caught in your maze.

With  kindnesses mask in lies devil’s hiding
Creator of  dark laws that I was abiding
In fine printed  letters a future was hinted
No glasses to see it, no light to have lit it.
Like a mouse to a trap with blindness I ran
Without any judgment, without any plan
The light you were shining too strong to resist
When all that before you was darkest of mists
And darkness behold me, ten oceans of it
As light slowly fades and hopes start to quit.

How i envy the masses, the ones with no soul
With nothing to lose from when nothing at all
They walk the life empty and empty they leave
No deeds to worth mention nor mention they need
Without love  to fight for and no great reward
All part of the no-plan, all part of the herd.
I envy the lovers, the ones that have found
The beauty of loving without heavy bound
Without restless nights and painful despair
They have but each other and each other to share
The rarest of people, named  be they  alive
No soul are they selling, no reason to strive.
The wicked I envy, the ones who are fake
With clever disguises they want and they get
And honest their love be, to get they lie well
No harm in their doings with no one to tell.

I love you this moment, I’ll love you like mad
With all things that make you, with all that is bad
Unique as  your beauty  your gift is unique
That’s meant for the worthy and not those who seek.
Still I’ll sick it forever, a curse that I bear
And barely I bear it as in grave void I stare
For all that is left now is  shadows of light
The echoes of future long passed in the night.

The sun has now set   as moonlight revealed
An unwritten ending  to this story concealed.