"I don't wanna hide anymore" Photograph - Limited Edition of 15

Elena Raceala is a contemporary visual artist and photographer based in Constanța, Romania. Her work looks for stillness in a noisy world, in the human and urban fragments that seem ordinary at first glance but hold a quiet poetic depth.

She began as a self-taught photographer and completed the School of Photographic Art at the "Teodor Th. Burada" Cultural Center in Constanța in 2019. Her practice has since moved across several languages: cinematic black-and-white photography, surreal staged portraits, serial travel work such as *Radiography of a Journey*, and, most recently, color abstraction through intentional camera movement (ICM) and defocus. What stays constant is her attention to light, to transience, and to the moment just before something disappears.

Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Constanța Art Museum (*Fraction of Light*, 2020), in Bucharest and in Turin, and in group exhibitions in Venice, Genoa, Berlin and Palermo. Saatchi Art curators have featured her photographs in several collections. Elena also works as Head Curator for an international art platform and collaborates with the Romanian cultural publication LiterNet.

## ARTIST STATEMENT

I photograph what we usually walk past.

A staircase, a window, a stranger crossing a hallway: these are the banal spaces of everyday life, but for me they are thresholds. Light enters them, people pass through them and leave almost nothing behind. My work tries to hold on to that almost-nothing.

For years I did this through stillness: black-and-white frames, staged portraits, quiet geometric compositions. In my recent work I turned the camera itself into a brush. With intentional camera movement and deliberate defocus, walls dissolve into warm fields of amber and red, and passers-by become silhouettes, half present, half memory. The image stops describing a place and starts describing how it feels to move through it.

Whether in a still frame or in a gesture of light, I am searching for the same thing: the quiet poetry hidden inside passing moments, and a pause of stillness in a world that rarely stops.