Twelve Romanian photographers and two guests from abroad have opened the first edition of the European Photo Salon Baia Mare. The exhibition was held in the presence of the artists on Saturday, September 10, at the Minerul Cinema. Being uniquely large for the Nortehrn region of Romania, the event was organized at the “Baia Mare 2021” Foundation’s initiative, regathering fourteen personal exhibitions which have weighed tradition and documentary rigor with the most important topics of the moment, spontaneous frames with the compositional experiments.
Baia Mare has provided the national photography with powerful personalities and unique talents that have marked Romania’s cultural and photographic life in the last 20 years. By continuing this brilliant tradition, the city became, starting from this year, a good host for the most interesting and relevant forms of photographic language. A uniquely large event for the region, the European Photo Salon Baia Mare have opened the dialogue on the narrative and projective power of the photography to new audiences and new spaces, bringing together Petrut Calinescu, Cristian Crisbasan, Dan Ioan Dinescu, Vasile Dorolti, Silviu Ghetie, Mihai Grigorescu, Tony Melvin, Ioana Moldovan, Olah Laszlo Tibor, Alexandru Paul, George Popescu, Hajdu Tamas, Oleg Tishkovets and Remus Tiplea.
Thus, this month, Baia Mare became the host of dozens of national and international awards, as well as several famous author series in albums and international exhibitions. The diversity of the approaches has offered a tour de force to the visitors in the Romanian photography of the last years, in its most interesting approaches: from Cristian Crisbasan’s nudes, to the Mihai Grigorescu’s mystic landscapes, from the war or travel reports signed by Ioana Moldovan, George Popescu or Petrut Calinescu, to the visual metaphors captured by Hajdu Tamas, Vasile Dorolti or Alexandru Paul. Photography, in its whole artistic power, can be frustrating and challenging at Silviu Ghetie and oleg Tishkovets or, equally well, it can be nostalgic and revealing at Tony Melvin, Dan Ioan Dinescu or Remus Tiplea.
European Photo Salon Baia Mare 2016 is a pilot event which declares the photographic art and the related creative trades as a structural pillar in order to obtain the title of European Capital of Culture 2021. The premises of organizing an international photo salon in Baia Mare are double: reasserting the tradition and exploiting the most relevant trends. As Vasile Dorolti, the curator of the salon, explains: “Photography has become a social phenomenon. The technical explosion allowed some shooting systems to be embedded in the most various types of equipment and devices, making available to everybody a photo or video camera. The contemporary man is permanently accompanied everywhere by the magic darkroom. While the photographic technique is easily accessible to anyone with negligible costs, we can’t say the same about the rhythm in which the ‘photographic language’ is appropriated by most of us.”
