Curatorial Selection, Private Link
Artist Mini-Statement
I am a documentary photographer from Bucharest, active since 1979. My practice builds a long‑term visual archive of the city’s everyday life, with attention to public space, vernacular culture, and the subtle shifts that define urban identity. My work often explores how people, objects, and informal structures inhabit the city, revealing the textures of lived experience that formal narratives overlook. More about my published work can be found at https://carturesti.ro/autor/andrei_birsan
Project Description – Bucharest Before EU
Celebrating two decades of Romania in the EU
“Bucharest Before EU” documents the capital in the years leading up to Romania’s accession to the European Union (2000–2010), a period of rapid social, economic, and visual transformation. The project follows the city as it moves through the tension between two eras: the persistent post‑communist landscape and the emerging signs of Europeanization, consumer culture, and global corporate aesthetics.
The photographs examine how urban identity was reshaped in this transitional moment. Street scenes, improvised advertising, markets, public transport, and everyday human presence reveal a city negotiating its future while still anchored in familiar visual languages, from informal commerce and hand‑painted signage to the first waves of standardized branding.
“Bucharest Before EU” stands both as historical testimony and as a reflection on memory, transformation, and the cultural specificity of a city redefining itself at the threshold of the European Union.
A few pages from the album
The album contains 640 pages in 165×235 mm format and over 900 photographs.
Selected Works (2000–2010)
The following selection presents key images from the project, focusing on public space, everyday life, and the
visual traces of transition in Bucharest before EU accession.
Then and now a few visual comparisons
The images below place side by side two moments of the same city. Bucharest then and now look at each other like reflections in a mirror, and between them you can read the way time has worked, sometimes visibly, other times quietly.
Artist Bio
Andrei Bîrsan (born 1965, Bucharest) is a documentary photographer and founder of the Visual Memory Center of
Bucharest https://www.bucurestiulmeudrag.ro/. Active since 1979, he has built one of the most extensive photographic archives of the city’s everyday life. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Communism (2024), the Museum of Bucharest
(2021–2026), Ferrum Art Gallery (2026), and in numerous public spaces. He organizes exhibitions, urban
photography events, and visual memory projects dedicated to Bucharest.
Contact
Andrei Bîrsan
București, Romania
Email: orasulb@gmail.com
Phone: +40 743 076 255
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/a_birsan/