Interview: Avram Finkelstein

“If the you and I’s of this world don’t have this conversation and it doesn’t lead to other sets of thoughts...”

It is towards the beginning of this interview that Avram Finkelstein, in his therapeutic geniality, elicits a confession from me: the confession of my frustration. The frustration about the political passiveness of the larger part of my generation, born from the relentless grinding of consumerism; the feeling that collective effort is not really something that seduces many of my peers in any way; the vexation of being cut off from the political effort and achievements of our elders. 

It is no helpful attitude, I am aware, and certainly not a great conversation starter. But Avram waves it aside with a confident insistence: “You may feel balkanised, you may feel like you live in a world in which collaboration is more difficult than ever, you may feel you live in a world in which social spaces are harder to activate but as somebody – I’m 63 – who has lived in many worlds, I feel it’s actually easier in a way. We’re just told that it’s harder. The trick is to not listen. To not listen to that.”

We talk via Skype, and while I am sat in my dark, spare South Welsh living room by a cup of tea, it seems to be sunny on the US east coast. Behind Avram, huge bookshelves tower over him in the bright light, their centre adorned by a Chinese communist poster. Once I can hear a foreign police siren, as if straight out of a Hollywood movie, blaring in the background. Avram seems worlds away from me; but as we talk he draws me in. 

We discuss his work in collectives, from the 1980’s AIDS activism flagship Silence=Death to his recent Flash Collective initiative. He considers the necessity and rewards of interacting with public spaces, and visual and performance art produced within the paradigm of political resistance. We argue the role of the individual in a collective, and today’s problematic historiography of HIV/AIDS. And as we speak, Avram never fails to give me a sense of, ‘You and I, we’re in this together.’ He is eager to hear me out, emphasising the value of our exchange. 

“We share an intergenerational responsibility that goes both ways: For young people to listen – you know, everyone’s back goes up because the assumption is, those old-timers who will tell you how it was and you need to listen. That’s not actually true. We need to listen, to all of the questions, all of the holes in the story so we can help a younger generation understanding all of its complexity while we’re both still here.”

“It’s my thing.”

He laughs when I wonder whether he might be fed up talking about collective cultural production, after all those years. “My entire life is dedicated to thinking about collectivity from a political and grassroots organising perspective, and cultural production. No, it’s my thing. I’m not sick of it. I have a lot to say about it.” He has always worked in collectives. The child of two communist parents, he appreciates the unifying and empowering potential of this strategy: “We’re told that there are intersectional tensions that are insurmountable because capitalism depends on our being balkanised. And any collective endeavour is an attempt to pierce through that.” An endeavour, he is quick to add, that is literally open to everyone who dares it, as long as they leave their ego at the door. 

“Individual identity can sometimes be somewhat antithetical, or emphasising individual identity can sometimes be antithetical to collectivity because the collective experience is really surrendering yourself to the other people in the room. Collectives are organisms, each one is different, each day that organism is different. I feel collaborative thinking is giving, learning when to trust enough to give in to the collective and that is something a lot of people find hard to do, but I don’t think it’s generational.”

Learning processes are essential to him, and if anything, his 63 years seem to be encouraging him. Recently it has been the concept of performativity - “everyone I know currently is in performance!” - that has helped him shine a new light on his work, and approach it from a different angle, and he seems to be enjoying it immensely. His pedagogical initiative, the Flash Collective, enables him not only to pass on resistance strategies to new audiences – varying profoundly in age and profession, from activists to academics – but to discover new ideas, learning new strategies himself from his collaborators. 

“I’ve come to realise the performative nature of the work that I used to consider visual cultural production. So I’ve actually spent time thinking about what performance is and the importance of performance in particular, the ways in which public spaces are performative. So I feel like I have learned more from younger artists than I have from my own peers who have settled ideas about cultural production that are somewhat crystallised.”

“The history of AIDS hasn’t begun to be written yet. But we’re pretending that it is.”

It is this crystallisation, the stagnation, that clearly bothers him. For years, he has been openly critical of what he calls 'AIDS 2.0', the “re-imagining of this historical moment that shuts out the potential for current and future activism”. It is a complacent, and somewhat lazy gaze back on the events of the 1980s and 1990s, pursued by stories such as told in the Academy Awards contender How To Survive A Plague. We’re witnessing over-simplifying, marginalising, misinterpreting attempts to press diverse, complex histories into one glorified historiography, written to suit the taste of late-stage capitalism. Its tale of heroes, complete with “beginning, middle, and end” has a finality to it, a deceptive conclusiveness to which Avram strongly opposes – not alone because it affects one of his most famous works, the ubiquitous Silence=Death poster.

“I think something like Silence=Death is a very funny case study. It’s a cardboard cutout that represents an entire generation of activists, queer activism, AIDS activism. It’s come through the mechanisms of late stage capitalism, it’s come to represent a whole series of ideas.”

The Silence=Death project was founded in 1985 by Avram, Jorge Soccaras, Oliver Johnston, Chris Lione, Brian Howard, and Charles Kreloff, as a consciousness-raising project based on popular feminist models. The six men – three of which previously hadn’t known each other – soon found each other continually debating the politics of HIV/AIDS. Eventually the idea of making a poster was brought forward by Avram, who had gained his political education in the anti-war movement and Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign. The result, with its eminent pink triangle and stark white letters, predated ACT UP by two weeks. Yet it became its most popular embodiment.

“The poster went up literally just two weeks before ACT UP formed. So in the AIDS historiography the story goes that Silence = Death is the ACT UP logo and it represents an entire generation of activism and a whole series of questions. But in fact it was created by six individuals, three of whom didn’t know each other … it was six people who designed that poster. It activated public spaces and it was ACT UP who was responsible for that.”

Avram is keen on pointing out that the Silence=Death poster couldn’t have existed as a product of any other collective. It is the brainchild of six individuals, not of an entire generation: a circumstance that has been neglected countless times, in the effort to smooth it into the predominant, institutionalised narrative. It is a superficial reading, erasing voices left, right and centre: “Communities are made of individuals and I’ve been writing about this in reference to the question of an AIDS historiography – the intersectionality; this very interesting kind of crosshatching of multiple generations with HIV-positive gay men.”

There are stories to be told, viewpoints to be opened. “The history of AIDS hasn’t begun to be written yet. But we’re pretending that it is.” If you ask Avram, he knows where he would start. His voice becomes excited:

“The How To Survive A Plague construction completely obliterates this parallel story that affects over half of the people in the world infected with HIV which has to do with the fact that up until 1991 they weren’t doing any surveillance on women with AIDS. And How To Survive A Plague doesn’t even touch on that. It’s a pretty interesting story: It took hundreds of activists years to get the CDC to redefine, to include manifestations of immunosuppression in women in the definition of AIDS. If I were an activist in 2070, I would want to hear that story, wouldn’t you?”

“I want to create a space for the replacement for the Silence = Death poster.”

“The whole idea of the flash collectives is: I want to create a space for the replacement for the Silence=Death poster.” 

It sounds crass, the way he bluntly throws this statement into our conversation. It breaks with the veneration we all share for that poster, the firm belief that, yes, this poster deserves its place in the museums. But let the words sink in, and they start to make sense, you can sense where Avram is coming from. Isn’t he proud of what the collective achieved, doesn’t he want it to go on? “I end up spending more time speaking against my own work ... because it’s like a doppelgänger, it’s like it’s trotted out to represent a whole set of things, but it’s a set of things that are so deeply institutional and totally ignore a whole other set of things.”

Avram is ready to move on, and he has found a way to return to the nitty-gritty of the Silence=Death Project, without falling for the glory-laden fantasy that the poster has come to represent. His Flash Collective initiative seeks to engage new audiences and activate public spaces by steering away from canonical cultural production, and by employing non-hierarchical, collective strategies in order to reframe social questions surrounding HIV/AIDS, gender, reproductive justice, and only recently, the refugee crisis.

“I want us to figure out what it means and set up whole new set of conversations so that the critiques that brought that poster into being will always be alive, that’s the point of the poster. The point of the poster is resistance. And those are the skills we need to make sure are always alive. That’s what the Flash Collective experiment is about, it’s trying to learn new strategies to make new work.”

Returning to his grassroots origins, Avram now challenges himself and others by forming collectives for only a couple of hours. In the limited time, Tumblr blogs are created and interventions in the public sphere are staged; each collective approaches a subject differently, and Avram is experimenting with “which arrows to draw out of your quiver that are going to be right for that room full of people at that moment”, because there are “a million strategies for collective cultural production”. Restricting the time window is only one of those strategies, but arguably one of the more effective, as he explains:

“The reason why I have experimented with the idea of condensed time frames is to remove a lot of the obstacles that we place in our own way when it comes to complex messages. We’re sort of led to believe that some things are too hard to talk about or too hard to understand and consequently we don’t ever attempt to, but I feel like saying something about social issues is more important than saying nothing. So the condensed time frame is a way of forcing people to going on the record.”

It opens the room to dialogue. A dialogue between the people in the collective – which, as Avram admits, can easily be subject to some tension between the participants –, and a dialogue with the space. When a Flash Collective was invited to contribute to Pawel Althamer’s Draftsmen’s Congress by drawing on the walls of a museum, they decided to challenge the brief. What does it mean to be invited into an established, mediated space like Manhattan’s New Museum, and is it really as egalitarian as it sounds? After all, which audience would behold the spectacle? They ended up producing stickers, claiming ‘This is not a safe space to be queer’, for the museum-goers to take and use. The pockets with the stickers were soon removed by the museum, but as Avram writes on his website, “the stickers are still visible on the streets of New York”. 

“It’s about the ways to articulate complex things.”

The public becomes the pivotal ground for dialogue, a paradigm that the collectives are maintaining since the Silence=Death days. And the dialogue could not be carried without a language. To Avram, the key that opens the door to the public is the familiar, sometimes provocative, sometimes humorous parlance of advertising.

“I feel like advertising vernaculars pose as declaratives but I feel like public spaces are interrogatives. And the key to understanding how to break through or to pierce through complicated subjects is understanding which questions to ask or reading responses as interrogatives. I feel like even when we’re in a public space and we’re saying something incredibly declarative, like to use a Gran Fury thing, “Kissing doesn’t kill: greed and indifference do”, we’re activating that space in the hope of a response, so in fact, what appears to be declarative is a dialogue. And I think it’s really essential to think any work in the public sphere as a dialogue and paying attention to the responses however they’re gaged.”

It makes a full circle, this strategy, twisting something that could not be more consonant with capitalism and consumerism to your own political ends. “[It is] a dynamic practice that is really about resistance strategies...it’s about the ways to articulate complex things.”

Avram cherishes his flash collectives because it is a way to pass this practice, his knowledge and experience of many years, on to the next generation, and make his voice heard without obliterating others. He is aware that time is precious. 

“You have this very limited period of time where people who were actually there in the beginning are still alive and young people who are completely versed in the complexity of historiography, archives, archival practices and intersectionality and are thinking about all that stuff, they are both alive at the exact same moment and that’s not going to be true forever. So I feel like we share an intergenerational responsibility and this goes back to the collectives.” Again, he calls on the duty of his peers. “It’s sacred ground for us. We lost a lot of people. But that doesn’t mean it’s over. We’re responsible to those people, to help critique the story, right?”

There it is again, this flicker, this ‘we’re in this together’ moment. It feels like he reaches out a hand through the screen. I can only imagine what it must be like to work in a collective with him, to be inspired to come up with something exciting in only a couple of hours, to thrust yourself in the transformative experience of collaboration. It sounds really easy and not scary, not frustrating at all. Let’s sit, and talk, and listen, really listen, and work. 

Avram pauses. In the past hour we sat, I drank a cup of tea, he ran to the bookshelf to find Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto for me, we chatted, we laughed. Now he is serious, almost weary.

“If the you and I’s of this world don’t have this conversations … We’re going to be gone and I don’t want someone else after we’re gone to say ‘this is what it meant’.”


All images provided by Avram Finkelstein.

The Photograph: Rudolf Nureyev

Rudolf Nureyev in La Bayadère, Palais Garnier 1974.
Image by André Chino.

The image shows Rudolf Nureyev, the dancer, the lover, the bon viveur: A lone bright figure on a dark Paris stage, his costume as radiant as his face. The performance that night is La Bayadère, Marius Petipa's romantic and exotic classic. 

Having only recently discovered the vast and omnifarious world of ballet for myself - don't worry, I'd rather watch than try the steps myself - I am drawn into the tales behind the perfect little pliés. And, oh my, is the name Rudolf Nureyev rich with stories. Take this image: It's one of those blissful moments in which life imitates (or should I say: is preceded by) art.

Nureyev certainly was the shining figure he presents in the picture. In his androgyny and intensity he quickly became a blazing star once he had escaped the bonds of the Soviet Union. Julie Kavanagh and Joan Acocella describe in detail how he, in his love for tights and self-presentation, set new standards for male ballet dancing.

But there's more to this image than, well, a pretty confident guy in dazzling white tights on a black stage. I was thrilled to learn that the scene depicted is La Bayadère's The Kingdom of the Shades, an opium-driven, hypnotic hallucination of a ballet. Arlene Croce of The New Yorker once outlined its substance beautifully:

"The subject of the Kingdom of the Shades is not really death, although everyone in it except for the hero is dead. It's Elysian bliss, and its subject is eternity ... [it is] a poem about dancing and memory and time."

The scene's theme echoes hauntingly in Nureyevs life. If his life, his world weren't created by hallucinatory drugs, they certainly were shaped by excess, by numerous lovers hidden in the shadows, by a relentless pursuit of fame. And in retrospect one can feel time pressing upon Nureyev - he must have felt it himself, dancing up into his 40s, unwilling to leave the limelight, half-joking about his "old galoshes". The stage, the dancing kept him alive as long as they could, as if to Nureyev death never really mattered - only the eternity in which his name, his work would be remembered. In 1992, shortly before his AIDS death, he, sick and struggling, staged his last ballet on a Paris stage: La Bayadère. 

This is the third installment of 'The Photograph', a series of pictures that I love, find remarkable or important, and which I will present on this blog on a non-regular basis.

Karolus Naga: Trans Islam

We find ourselves in the midst of a wild bout of Islamophobia that seems to have infected not only a large sum of confused individuals in my birth country (Pegida, I'm looking at you!) but indeed quite a lot of people across all of Western Europe - France with Je Suis Charlie and the Front National, Great Britain with its IS runaways and UKIP, Danmark and Sweden, to name only a very few. The tone is agitated, if not hysterical; the news scream at you with headlines and images, heated over the fire of prejudice and ignorance. In fact, the moment could hardly have been any more poignant when I rediscovered Karolus Naga, and his beautiful project Trans Islam. 

It's a fresh breeze, this project. Naga has uncovered the life at Pesantren Senen-Kamis, a Koran school for transgender and transvestites in Notoyudan, Indonesia. The classic black and white photojournalistic images are as adamant as they should be: persistently they remind the viewer that religion should be a place of communal joy and peace, and that the Islam is no exception to this. "People will find this place silly and nonsense", Naga quotes Maryani, founder of the centre, in his synopsis; but there is nothing silly in Naga's still, unbiased look. In the accompanying video the ambient noise of the school draws you in, alluring, almost hypnotising, into peaceful moments of prayer and conversation, shared by young and old, lovingly reflected in the calm monochrome pictures.

But Naga's view does not remain in the school; his eye wanders out to the community, to blazing sunshine and rainy streets, into dark alleyways and crammed back rooms, beauty salons and street markets, onto tattooed upper arms, heavy eye lashes, and happy smiles. In its best moments, the project is reminiscent of Christer Strömholm and his amies de place blanche, in their silent appreciation and admiration of vibrant characters, beauty and life itself. It transcends the subject of religion, captured in the title, and opens up to a fragile community. The perils of harassment and discrimination, sex work and self-destruction are not spared from the viewer, but neither are the cheerful faces, the pretty dresses, the guidance, strength and optimism of the portrayed persons. Every now and then a headscarf or a hand raised for prayer will lead you back to the central point of discussion, with the gentle reminder that you should never, ever judge a person solely on their religion, their profession, their appearance. (So deep, eh?!)

I like to imagine all the bigots crumbling when they see this project, slowly choking with their hate of Moslems, people of colour, trans people, sex workers; or possibly their heads exploding over the idea of a transgender Koran school: Diversity within a world religion, who would have thought? Maybe such a project will change some minds. Maybe it just makes the problem worse. Personally, I will hold on to the serenity and joy of Naga's images, and hope that I don't explode the next time I see a stupid headline, hear a stupid word, have to face all this weird hate. Hey, Europe, get a grip.

James Bidgood: Pink Narcissus, or The Woes of Money

James Bidgood, Cadet, Pink Narcissus

When I had just started university, "back in the days", I was asked to write a paragraph about 'a person I particularly admire'. My teacher at that time was a red-haired, henna-painted San Francisco native who would regularly spread some joy in the gray uni hallways with colourful pro-choice or gay-rights posters on her door. (That is how I remember her anyway...) Hence, I decided not to go with the typical "my grandmother because she has had a hard life" or "Beyoncé because... that booty!" choice. I went all the way and wrote a text about James Bidgood, whose Taschen monograph I had bought on discount in some obscure bookshop a few weeks before.

This is what 19-year-old me wrote about Bidgood: 

"The U.S.-American photographer and filmmaker James Bidgood is a person I particularly admire for his devotion to his work. Bidgood made his only film Pink Narcissus in the years from 1964 to 1970. In those six years, he and his leading actor shot scenes when they had enough money and otherwise lived from hand to mouth and slept in Bidgood's small apartment. There, he would design and build up all the required imaginative sets himself, using cheap and primitive materials such as plastic leaves, aluminium foil and chicken wire. Due to his perfectionism, Bidgood needed twenty to thirty takes and an incredible mass of footage for each scene. When the film was taken away from him before he could finish it he fell into depression and destroyed most of his film material. In regard to his enthusiasm and endurance as well as his creativity James Bidgood is an inspiration for many people who believe in what they love most."

James Bidgood, Mandolin, Gilded Cage, mid-1960s

Makes him sounds like a legend, doesn't it? To be honest, back then I wasn't to prone to research and most of the facts presented are probably taken straight from either the monograph or wikipedia. One thing I definitely omitted to acknowledge - negligently, I need to say, and for no good reason, given my rather, eh, liberal teacher: Bidgood is an artist with a vision. A very queer vision.

James Bidgood should be widely celebrated as a pioneer of gay art, because that is what he is. His images are wonderfully camp, bubblegum-coloured fantasies. The gorgeous boy models - Pink Narcissus' actor Bobby Kendall was Bidgood's lover - are wearing rather little, and in between all the glitter, glamour and kitsch (Bidgood's training as a New York costume designer certainly did not go unused) lies a naive longing for romance. The images, inspired by 1920s nude photography and the legendary Ziegfeld Follies revues, are a feast for the eyes, reveling in excess, in the beauty of a time where, to paraphrase the equally flamboyant Liberace, "too much of a good thing was wonderful".

Bobby Kendall in Pink Narcissus

But in the end, it was just a paragraph I had to write and I would soon move on to pen argumentative essays about whether homosexuals should be allowed to join the army (copies are provided on request). The monograph was packed into some box when I left the country some time later, and basically forgot. So when Out Magazine told their Facebook community today: "Fund This: James Bidgood's Art. The iconic photographer and designer is raising funds so he can continue creating.", it led me to make two surprising discoveries; that a) Bidgood is not, as I had assumed, dead; and b) that I am still totally crazy for his work, that I find it admirable, and that I think more people should be inspired by it.

So here's the deal: James Bidgood is fundraising. The godfather of all camp is alive and kicking, and he needs money to produce more glitz and glam with a new digital camera and (oh my goodness, think of the creative possibilities!) Photoshop. Because, you know, not every pioneer is rich. And even plastic leaves and chicken foil need to be paid.

So get your purse out, and excuse me while I go looking for the box with the monograph. And please say hi to my teacher.

Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2015

Today, I am really happy to read that Zanele Muholi, who I have written about several times on this blog, has been nominated for the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2015. The judges, among them photographer Rineke Dijkstra and Chris Boot of Aperture, decided to acknowledge Muholi's work Faces and Phases (2006-2014).

Earlier this year, I went to Paris Photo where I found Faces and Phases in its most recent form, an enormous book published by Steidl.

Just chillin' at Paris Photo shelves: Faces and Phases

Although I loved the simple design and the beautiful black and white printing (straightforward-ness always strikes a chord in me) and despite my long-declared love for Muholi's work, I actually did not end up buying the book. For a simple reason: I prefer those images on a wall, in a big print, when her subjects seem to look right back at you. In gallery prints the sheer power of Faces and Phases and other works is enriched by a sense of intimacy, which the book does not quite manage to pull off. Luckily Paris Photo is a powerhouse of photography, and in one of the many corners I found Muholi on the wall, too, as represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery from NYC.

Either way, it's lovely to see her work slowly being recognised on a much lager scale. The Deutsche Börse prize is a big deal, and she's up against strong competitors like the amazing Viviane Sassen. I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Pride: Review

I finally managed to watch Pride yesterday. For everyone who completely missed out on Facebook, Twitter and every relevant magazine, here's the trailer:

I was naturally curious to see it, since it's set in South Wales (where I happen to live), it's about the gay and lesbian community (which I happen to support), and it's about the struggle of the Welsh miners in that capitalist catastrophe better known as the Thatcher era. Produced by the BBC and starring a whole bunch of top actors, the film had its big debut in Cannes, and from thereon set out to conquer our hearts. 

It's a cheery little gem, this film. It just does everything right that is needed in order to give the audience a bloody good time. There are the outsiders and the oppressed, lots of fairly complex yet not overbearing characters to sympathise with. There are cleverly-written, cunning, funny lines, and there's the notorious scene highlight that includes a group of innocent women, some of them elderly, and a dildo. There's the lovely underlying message, quite a few prejudices from all sides taken on with good humour, there's the link to the real events of 1984/1985, and a heart-lifting climax. There's Dominic West and Andrew Scott as a loving couple - how can you not love them?!

It's a simple formula, I guess. Yet it works. It is such a feel-good film, it should be taught in film class at every college as the best example of the feel-good film. I can't quite put my finger on what makes Pride so special. It might be that everyone involved in making this movie really seemed to care. Or maybe it is just Dominic West and Andrew Scott, or that adorable Welsh accent. Maybe y'all should go watch the film and find out for yourselves.

(Warning: You'll find yourselves with a very possessive tune stuck in your head, and a sudden urge to show solidarity to anything around you. That's not a bad thing, mind you.)

Photo Festival Secvențe - a review

©Gabriel Amza

6th September, 2014. It's shortly after 4 pm, we're in the History Museum of Ploiești, Romania, and in less than half an hour I'm scheduled to give a talk. I've titled the presentation "Transcendence: Gender in Photography", rather optimistically, as for in my head it's more something between "the first spoken version of my blog, how exciting" and "what the f*** am I doing here". I haven't practiced. I haven't even looked at my notes twice. And to make everything even less predictable, my laptop won't work with the projector, and I don't have an USB stick.
Thanks God there's Anda. Anda is here, friendly, caring, and although she doesn't speak English very well - and my Romanian is basically non-existent - she's got a laptop, an USB stick, and she knows what she is doing.
The first page of my presentation appears on the wall. Slowly the room fills with visitors, curiously staring alternately at me or their smart phones. I'm ready to go, just waiting for the last group to flood in, and practicing opening lines in my head. 
I turn around.
The laptop is blank, and the wall dark. I have no idea what... "ANDA?"

It's the second edition of the photo festival Secvențe in Ploiești, and although it's my second time exhibiting, it's the first time I've actually made it to the town of 300,000 people south-east of the Carpathians. I'm here thanks to an invitation by festival founder and study colleague Cătălin Munteanu, and I have to say, I'm quite impressed.
Driven by Cătălin and his never tiring volunteers, the festival aims to carefully wake the curiosity for photography among the Ploieștians, and given the versatile and thought-through programs, they've got every reason to be curious. Alongside exhibitions in some of the city's most prestigious buildings, there are a street display, talks, portfolio presentations, workshops, concerts and a lantern party in the city park. And although the program is packed, my companion Mira and I never find ourselves running from one place to another; there's always time for a chat, a stroll through the park or one of the notorious pastries from that Gigi place right opposite the history museum. From a North-Western European (okay, German) point of view, Romanians practice a jolly laissez-faire in regards to time: You're 'late'? There is no such thing as 'late'. 'Ten minutes' might be thirty. Once you get the rhythm, it's truly liberating.
The exhibitions themselves are oscillating between documentary, photo art, fashion, portrait and whatever else comes to mind. It's a colourful, yet challenging mix of foreign photographers like Mira and me, and Romanians from all over the country. While in some places the exhibitions have been carefully curated, others are more motley, and they succeed or fall with the location. In the giant hall of the Cultural Palace the few photo walls seem a bit lost, and the street display is struggling with the strong winds; in the pub Conac however, the giant prints look like home. 
Given that it's only its second edition, it is only natural that Secvențe is suffering from a few infantile disorders. The funding stems mainly from Cătălin and his volunteers' pockets, so the exhibitions are kept as simple as possible (that includes tons of blue tac) and there's a disheartening lack of advertisement which leads to the larger masses ignoring the small festival. It's again the Conac that is attracting the majority of visitors, as it is also the locations for the nightly concerts. Together with the street display, it's where the audience is at. The talks and workshops are rather visited by the photographers, coming from near and far to attend the show, and the volunteers; after a few of them, you know their faces.
What I thoroughly enjoy throughout the festival is the constant exchange with these people, though. By the second afternoon, Mira and I have our 'gang', consisting of a few Romanian photographers - much needed, as they translate to us most of what is going on - and their friends. Together we discuss our projects, the state of women in the arts, Romanian history, traditional sports, studying abroad; or we simply enjoy some documentary films by a bottle of beer. As diverse the exhibitions are, as different are the people we meet: there is always something to discuss, to ask, to laugh about. Most of them are also giving a presentation, like me, and are as excited to hear feedback. Sometimes it gets as profound as it can get in photography:
"Projects are like girlfriends - they come and go", philosophises Gabriel.
- "Maybe you haven't met the right project yet!"
"Maybe there isn't the right project..."
- "You are such a slut!"
At the end of the day it's the atmosphere that makes the festival great for me. It's a good atmosphere. It's warm, summery even, the people are nice, helpful, cheerful (I have mentioned Anda, my guardian angel?). You don't have to speak Romanian, you just get along. There is so much to see, and it feels easy, accessible, even when you're from a different culture entirely.
There's a lot of space to grow in for Secvențe. The blood, sweat and tears of Cătălin and his volunteers are only to be applauded, and I really hope that Secvențe is going to continue, to make more and more people excited about photography - there really is something for everyone at this festival, and if it is just a beer and a good chat, than that's fine.

Meanwhile, back at the History Museum, I've somehow made it through the first few slides, a tour de force through gender theory, and people genuinely seem to like what I'm doing. This is the reason why I don't practice: I'm much more free, I can be responsive, I can happily shout "Gender is fun!" five times in fourty minutes - which I do, as Mira points out afterwards. When Gabriel loudly appreciates my re-telling of the gender-bending adventures of Scott Schuman, "This guy is fabulous!", I'm like f***, yeah. I'm really enjoying myself. Everything is going well. Problems? No problems. I'm in Romania, I don't speak Romanian, I'm at a photography festival talking about Gender Studies, and everyone's fine. Hello, Ploiești, nice to meet you, see you next year.

©Cătălin Munteanu

©Cristina Venedict

The included photographs are examples of work by a few of the many photographers I met during the festival. A write-up of the presentation "Transcendence: Gender in Photography", also known as "GENDER IS FUN!", will follow soon in several blogposts over the next few weeks. Keep your eyes peeled, and watch out for Secvențe!
Also, please excuse the weird font on the Romanian characters. Romanian is something that my blog, like me, sadly refuses to learn.