Als er 2000 nach Rumänien reiste, war Davin Ellicson fasziniert vom ländlichen Leben in der Region Maramures. 2003 zog er nach Rumänien, wo er für ein Jahr mit einer Bauernfamile lebte. Aus diesem Aufenthalt entstand sein Langzeitprojekt “Maramures” über das ländliche Leben in Rumänien.
Davin Ellicson, geboren 1978 in Massachusetts, studierte Fotojournalismus und dokumentarische Fotografie am London College of Communication. Er lebt und arbeitet zurzeit in Bukarest / Rumänien. Davin Ellicson wird vertreten von Wonderful Machine (USA) und Anzenberger. Einige Bilder des Maramures-Projekts sind in dem Buch “EAST” von Anzenberger erschienen, das verschiedene Projekte aus Osteuropa vorstellt.
Ich bitte um Verständnis, wenn ich das Interview aus Zeitgründen nicht ins Deutsche übertrage. Hier möchte ich auf diverse Dienste im Internet verweisen, wie zum Beispiel hier von Yahoo, die Internetseiten zumindest grob übersetzen.
Peter F. (PF): Davin, in 2003 you moved to Romania and lived there with a peasant family for a year in the rural Maramures region. Can you tell us something about your motivations to go there?
Davin Ellicson (DE): It was Anthony Suau’s work. I saw his images coming out of Romania in 1990-1992 right after the revolution when I was 13 or 14 years-old and they made a huge impression on me.
It seemed there was still an area of Europe that was largely agrarian and had traditional rural life cut off from the modern world and I wanted to experience it for myself. Other former Eastern Bloc countries had it too to a degree of course, but Romania’s countryside seemed more romantic from the pictures I was seeing. Later I came into contact with the great Czech master Josef Koudelka’s photography, which only made me want to go to Eastern Europe and Romania all the more.
I did get to Prague in 1998, but it was in 2000 while studying French in Paris on an abroad program from Carleton College in Minnesota, that I used our one week mid- term break to take the train from the Gare de L’Est to Bucharest. The trip was a life changing event for me. Romania had changed little in the first decade after Communism and I was able to see a side of Europe that had long vanished elsewhere.
I had read about Maramures and knew it was the most traditional region in Europe where people still wore folk costumes on a daily basis, so I knew I wanted to go there. I only spent two days in the region in 2000 but vowed I would get back there as soon as I could. It was in the summer of 2002 that I returned and happened to meet the Nemes family making a haystack in the village of Valeni in early September. They asked me to stay with them for the night. Although I left the next morning I knew that I had to get back to the village at all costs.
I returned to the US and worked at luxury boutique hotel for two months in western Massachusetts where I am from to make some money. In December, I arrived back in Valeni with the understanding that I would stay for about a month in order to witness the traditional Christmas festivities including the ritual pig slaughter. Well, one month turned into one year! I just kept extending my stay with the Nemes family. Each season brought new things to witness and to participate in. The year was really as much about the personal experience for me as it was about the photography. I used my Leica to further heighten the village life I was living.
PF: Originally you studied French and European History. How did this fascination for Europe begin and where did it come from?
DE: It seems my family has always had strong European ties. On my father’s side there is Swedish blood a few generations back and my mother lived in Switzerland as a child. My first trip to Europe in June 1988 was a pivotal moment for me. I simply loved Paris and Lucerne and Rome! Right then and there, I knew I wanted to be European. From this point I could appreciate the strengths of America but also knew that European culture was special and that Europeans seemed to be living and enjoying life on a whole other level. I can still remember the taste of the pizza I ate in Rome at a terrace restaurant with the Italian friends we were visiting. Do I remember the pizza I ate at Pizza Hut in America the same year? No!
PF: You started to photograph at the age of ten. On what point do you realize that you are a photographer and not a historian? Or are you both at the same time?
DE: I think of myself as a photographer and not a historian, While I enjoyed the formal training as a historian at Carleton College, I also was a history major in college because I felt I needed to be studying something ‘serious’ and ‘legitimate’. In hindsight, I wish I had pursued a double major in anthropology and photography.
PF: How was your approach to the people in the Maramures. Was there a language barrier? Was there a big curiosity for an alien visitor from America?
DE: I have never formally studied Romanian (although I just met a woman who has agreed to begin teaching me here in Bucharest), but I had studied French in high school and college. Romanian is a Romance language and I am able to converse in it although I can’t write it too well. Maramures actually has its own dialect and I learned to speak it as opposed to proper Romanian. I still find I can understand and speak with country folk better than I can with people in Bucharest.
The village of Valeni welcomed me for an entire year. I was invited to weddings, funerals, parties and into people’s homes with open arms. Peasant life exists disconnected in a way from modern, western ways of being. Romanians are generally incredibly hospitable. The inhabitants of the Maramures villages take this up another notch and literally force huge amounts of food and shots of 110 proof plum brandy upon you.
PF: Many of the photographs in your Maramures project use a classic and timeless black and white style, showing a nearly unchanged rural life. Are the changes not yet that visible or is the traditional aspect the main focus of your work?
DE: Yes, originally the traditional way of life was the focus. I was absolutely obsessed with the archaic aspects of life in Maramures. The more traditional the house or the horse cart (wooden spoked wheels as opposed to rubber ones) the better!
Actually, a lot has changed since I did the initial work. It seems I got there right before the storm. Most of the youth in the village now spend their year in Italy or Spain working itinerant agricultural jobs or construction. There were no mobile phones or internet or satellite TV when I was there but technology has suddenly arrived and so have imported cars and a few tractors.
Pictures I made just a few years ago are now unrepeatable. I knew that it was only a matter of time and it was my rage to capture this fading life that led me to Maramures in the first place. Communism helped keep in tact a whole zone in Europe where life continued as it had for centuries. An expanding European Union is at last changing that. Globalization is reaching its tentacles further and further into the far corners of the continent. Soon, there won’t be too much adventure left in an increasingly homogeneous world. I want to seek out and capture the last vestiges of this agrarian life before it is too late.
PF: Most of your color work of the Maramures seems to be more present-day compared to the black and white images. How do you see the similarities and differences between the color and the black and white images?
DE: I’ve been experimenting in color for a few years but feel I am still exploring. I think it is easier to make a powerful image in black and white. Black and white is an abstraction from reality. We are all used to seeing in color and a good color photograph needs to go beyond the color. There a few photographers working within the documentary reportage tradition who seem to do this quite well, Gueorgui Pinkhassov, Alex Webb and Jonas Bendiksen come to mind.
I have been photographing recently almost entirely in color in part because most assignments require it. Everything I’ve been doing for Bloomberg News and The International Herald Tribune of course has been in color. However, for a recent Courrier Japon book project that organized 132 photographers to photograph around the theme of ‘hope’ on Barack Obama’s inauguration day, 20 January 2009, I began experimenting with desaturating the color and I am liking the effects I am getting.
PF. You photographed Saami Reindeer Herders and rural life in Romania; both are vanishing ways of life. Do you feel a strong loss being aware of this? Is your photography an attempt to record these natural ways of life for ensuing ages?
DE: As much as I enjoy modern life and wireless internet and good heath care for example, there is no question that 21st century life, on the whole, is missing something crucial. It may be comforting that one can get a latte just about anywhere now, but life outside the globalized world is special. You feel more alive, you are more aware, the food tastes better, you just feel better, more relaxed, healthier, more in tune with the natural world. Humans were meant to live in touch with nature. The recent trends in organic food and farmer’s markets etc. in the West attests to this. Technology is helpful only up to a point. In the coming years there will be a huge shift back towards nature and we are already seeing this in certain places.
Yes, I think creating a record of what once was is important, but even beyond that, photographing in Maramures has been more about something for myself. Maramures is a place I needed to experience for a long while. It was a like a drug I just could not get enough of. I really lust after the place when I am not there. Pressing the shutter in Maramures is always an immensely fulfilling experience for me.
Ultimately, I want to personally savor the magical, peaceful place before it vanishes forever and the act of photographing has offered me a way to do so. I have sought to capture the strength of peasants’ traditions—their old farming practices and their folk costumes—and the vitality of their existence—their optimism and joy for simply living full lives in synch with nature. The 21st century world is moving farther and farther away from its agrarian past and a unique connection with the earth is being lost.
PF: Recently you started to cooperate with the NGO Ovidiu Rom in Bucharest. Can you explain in a few words what this NGO is doing? In which way this cooperation is helpful for your work?
DE: Ovidiu Rom is an NGO founded by Leslie Hawke, the mother of American actor Ethan Hawke. Leslie first came to Romania in 2000 as a Peace Corps volunteer. Afterwards, she decided to stay on and founded her charity, which seeks to help put impoverished Romanian children in school. Leslie is doing extremely important work. Romania has Europe’s largest Roma population and there is still a long way to go towards eradicating the dire poverty that exists in some of the rural areas here.
My photography for Leslie is pro bono but I think doing this kind of work is quite fulfilling as one is not constrained like one is sometimes while working for a newspaper or magazine and of course you are documenting crucial humanitarian work. NGO work is another outlet for making pictures and getting one’s work out into the world.
PF: Are the inhabitants of the Maramures aware of the upcoming social upheavals? What do they expect from their future?
DE: Romania joined the European Union two years ago and strict EU agricultural standards as well as plans of foreign investment (in the form of tourism and motels etc.) now threaten the centuries-old way of life. EU membership has allowed many Maramures youth to leave to work in Western Europe with legitimate work contracts. There is now a huge obsession with making money and certain traditions are being thrown out the window. Many young people are sending back thousands of Euros to their families and some aspects of traditional village life are changing over night.
When I was in Valeni last April, for instance, the festival in the month of May when all the village’s sheep are blessed by the priest and milked before being sent into the mountains for the summer with shepherds had been discontinued. This was an age-old event that I had previously witnessed that was simply ended because many villagers were now in Western Europe working.
It is hard to imagine what life In Maramures will be like, say, in 25 years time. The region is very hilly and so large scale farming like what we have in the US or Western Europe can never happen in Maramures. I think right now everyone just wants to have a car, an expensive camera mobile phone and install a shower and bathroom and finish all the rooms in the house. People are aware of what is happening and what is being lost, yet the desire to move up in the world trumps it all.
PF: Also a long-term project like your Maramures project has to come to an end. Do you see already a horizon for your work in Romania? What do you want to achieve before you can close this project?
DE: Well, I have always wanted to see the project through to an actual conclusion, but at this point I may be waiting for 10 years. So, I am heading up there this weekend to catch the last of the winter’s snow and to see how Valeni is faring. Maybe I’ll make a book maquette and call it finished after this year. I have already had an offer to publish from Charta Art Books in Milan and I ultimately envision a book of images similar to what John Berger did in words with his trilogy “Into Their Labours“.
The real issue for me too is that my time amongst the peasants has been the high points of my life and I worry that I won’t get to experience such levels again. I mean I am constantly wondering when I will next get to have a maximum life experience? This unanswered question actually keeps me up at night. So, if I end the project I will certainly need to find a new project that will put me out on the edge and push me to my limits. But this is getting harder and harder to do in our wired world. Even Burger King passed through Maramures recently: whoppervirgins.com.
PF: Davin, thank you for this interview.
