Statement

I am a nostalgic: through my work I aim to regain the lost feeling of presence, typical of the analogue era, when life was slower paced and even feelings seemed to last longer.

I create images that at a first glance look “wrong” to arrest and induce a state of contemplation in the viewer to help her/him to regain the feeling of presence and calmness, that has become extremely rare in the schizophrenic times we live in. It is also an invitation to explore what lays underneath what we call "reality".

I don't care about visual information accuracy - so dear to megapixels -, what matters to me is the atmosphere. For this purpose, I even manipulate the film in the shooting and developing process to accentuate the grain to achieve a more painterly effect.

The inner conflict that I experienced in my personal life, growing up between two opposite realities, the Romanian communist and the Italian capitalist ones and my need for a third reality that synthesizes my conclusions of what is good of each one of the two, translates into my natural instinct of shooting multilayered photographs.

By immortalising the details of the scene that attract my attention I create a condensed experience of finally feeling “at home”, in a reality that does not need retouching.
For me home is where there is time to find and contemplate beauty.

Biography

Ioana Vrabie is a well travelled international photographer known for shooting mesmeric multiple exposure analogue images that at a first glance look "wrong".
Her images arrest the viewers and invite them to look deeper and deeper into their layers to achieve a state of profound presence typical of the analogue era and break free from the hectic scrolling and sweeping of digital images on portable devices.

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 own personal truth and identity through questioning what was right and what was wrong since an early age.

She showed an early inclination towards writing and visual arts, winning a few local prizes in both disciplines.

At the age on sixteen her grandfather gifted her with a Zorki 6 (the Eastern European version of Leica II) and her love for photography started.

It was only in her late twenties that she decided, after travelling the world as flight attendant and being exposed to the variety of the World for almost a decade, to study photography at University of Arts London and take her passion to the next level.

She started to work as digital commercial photographer –she was not very happy with the long hours spent on retouching - and at Photofusion, a camera club that kept alive her old love for analogue.

There she received a providential gift from a stranger: a bag full of expired film rolls that she took together with her analogue camera on a long trip to Italy, India and Bali in search of a capturing "a reality that does not need retouching".

During this trip she felt overwhelmed by the beauty of her surroundings and she instinctively started to allow her eyes to wander and her body to move through space, and shoot multiple exposure images, feeling a deep sense of liberation arising from overlapping different perspectives on the same film frame. Her signature style and the series Eyescapes was born.
The inner conflict that she experienced in her personal life transpires into her work: the fact that she lived suspended between two different and overlapped realities is mirrored into her photographs that represent 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.