Dreaming in Monochrome: An Interview with Patricia Morosan

There's an unmatched quality to the analogue medium, and such is the case for photographer Patricia Morosan. A loyal user of black and white film, Patricia's “Sun Stands Still” series explores her home country through monochromatic pictorialism that seems to come from a dream sequence. Her intimate chance encounters of creatures, places, and people are sure to take your breath away.

Here's our interview with Patricia.

Hi Patricia, welcome to Lomography Magazine! Firstly, what got you into working with film photography?

I started photographing with film from the beginning and I have never really got into digital photography, yet. For me, the analog seems a way of approaching the world. It is not really accessible in the immediate sense. Film photography... it's a process and carries in it the potential of a secret! I love that I cannot see what I have photographed instantly and I also love that other person cannot see it, right away. The transfer happens without the need of constant confirmation. You have to believe that it happens, without seeing it.

You shoot a lot in black and white film while painting ephemeral or dream-like pictures. May you share with us more about your aesthetic?

The aesthetics only serves the means. I am interested in poetic language, as well as subjective, emotional photography. I want to see works which are really personal, no matter the subject they are following; so I become personal in my works. The black and white seemed at the beginning of a good start, because of its abstraction character. Sun Stands Still
was my very first work and mostly it is an exploration of my personal inner world. I believe that any medium of expression is only a tool to explore ourselves and through it communicate our positions in the world.

Your series the Sun Stands Still seem to be stills that captured from a fleeting moment. What inspired you for this project?

Sun Stands Still is an impossibility, as the title also indicates. It remembers the desire we have for overcoming the impossible. The series searches for an in-between place of spiritual matter where memories and images are archived. The main impulse for Sun Stands Still are traces of spirituality.

As a photographer, what's the most important element in a composition?

Well, that will be again light!!

Where do you draw inspiration from?

From curiosity. I think curiosity is a very creative trigger and it generates a precious openness and the need to explore. All kind of sources of inspiration is just there, ready to be received. But we need to look at them. It's not an easy task to look. Of course, we can frame inspiration as we frame the world through photography. So that will be in my case, that I am instinctually inspired by mysterious things. Or by contradictions. Or by extremes. But these things are only a matter of personality. We will only perceive that what we are looking for, in accordance with our personal nature. The big task is to unframe, I guess, and to look also in the direction of what we usually would not look. I am looking therefor for an unframed inspiration.

Is there any photographer or artist, dead, alive or fictional that you'd like to meet?

With German documentary filmmaker Uli M Schueppel.

What does an ordinary day look like for Patricia Morosan?

An athletic one.

Any on-going project, or other plans you're keen to work on?

I am currently working on a series about Europe, which explores an existential and political theme: the search for the center. I have traveled for this project in Belarus, Ukraine, Estonia, Germany, Lithuania, Austria, Poland, and Slovakia. The work will be shown for the first time on the beginning of October at the graduation exhibition of Ostkreuz in Berlin. Along with the exhibition, a book will be released.

Visit Patricia's website for more of her works.

2018-08-22 #Gens #black-and-white-photography #patricia-morosan