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In modernizing institutions, new laws to permit intimate partner visits for prisoners were established. Cosmin Bumbuţ visited every penitentiary in Romania and photographed the boudoirs.
We’re obsessed with sex as much as we’re shy to talk about it open and honestly. We’re fascinated by prisons, particularly fictionalized accounts of prisons (Oz, Animal Factory, Shawshank, Orange Is The New Black, The Green Mile, the list goes on-and-on) but often our fascination doesn’t extend far enough to talk openly about what our prisons actually are and how they’re a symptom of a divided, racist, unforgiving social order. We’ve still a lot to unpack around prisons. Around sex too, we’re picky about what and where we unpack. I say this to acknowledge the fact that this is an article about sex, and prisons, and sex in prisons and those are fiery catalysts to the imagination. Be honest, you’re here because of the headline and you’re wondering whether to read these 1,300 words or just scroll through the pictures.
Fortunately, for us, these pictures, made by Romanian photographer Cosmin Bumbuţ (who is also one half of Teleleu.eu), sate our outsider curiosity without dragging us into a debased voyeuristic quagmire.
The series, titled Camera Intima, is expertly shot with phenomenal manipulation of space and lenses to secure these angles. Despite some of these rooms being converted basement store-rooms, the photos are well-lit and flooding with joyous color and pattern. Perhaps you enter this photo essay — and these rooms — expecting cheap gags, but you exit with a rounded and informed perspective on a type of room designed to meet 21st century policy, to ensure dignity and to bolster family relationships.
“In 2007, Romania joined the European Union,” explains Bumbuţ. “The whole prison system went through major revamp and the biggest reform was to introduce the right to private visits.”
Simply put, the price for entry into Europe’s *modern* club was to allow previously-forgotten and despised convicts to get it on with their loved ones. Married prisoners and those in long term relationships have the right to one 2-hour private visit, every three months.
“Plus, if a prisoner gets married in detention he or she can spend 48 hours with the spouse in the special room and is allowed visits once a month in the first year of marriage,” explains Bumbuţ.
It’s obvious to say that these conjugal visit rooms are for sex. But it’s worth noting they are intended only for sex. In the United States, by comparison, conjugal visit trailers and designated rooms are set aside for the whole family. In these Romanian rooms, the only visitors are intimate partners but in the United States the purpose of family visits is broadened beyond just sex. Prisoners spend time with their children, siblings and parents; trailer visits are meant to strengthen family bonds throughout the entire clan. As such, US trailers have kitchens, dining and common areas.
In Bumbuţ’s photos we see mostly, just the beds. For all their undeniably functional design for the carnal, these rooms are rather underwhelming. At its root, this photo essay could be of cheap motel rooms; they share the same essential elements — TV, mini-fridge, the occasional soft furnishing, nasty carpet and a sign or two reminding occupants of rules. The picture that these are prison rooms is Bumbuţ’s image of the cover page of the ‘Intimate Room’ handbook.
Between 2013 and 2014, Bumbuţ photographed the “private rooms” in all 40 Romanian penitentiaries. “I think I can boast of being the only civilian who entered all the Romanian prisons,” he says.
It wasn’t a project that came out of the blue. Back in 2009, he facilitated a photo workshop for women prisoners in Târgșor Penitentiary (more about that here). Soon after that he embarked on a multiyear project documenting life in the notorious Aiud Penitentiary. He witnessed a creaking and unsanitary lock-up trying to clean up and drag itself into the 21st century.
“In 2005, Aiud looked like a prison from the Communist era. Rooms were dirty and the walls unpainted, the cells were very small and crowded,” says Bumbuţ. “In 2008, it was renovated and the cells were expanded, the prisoners didn’t wear uniforms and were referred to as ‘Persons deprived of liberty’! Romanian prisons started to look like the ones from the American movies, with white walls and new metal shiny doors.”
Even though prisoners are still handcuffed, Bumbut has, since 2008, been prohibited from photographing cuffed prisoners. Now it’s about image as much as it is about policy. When Bumbuţ first made his request to the National Prison Administration to photograph the conjugal visit rooms, he received quick approval and thanks for his dedication and help to the prison administration programs. Bumbuţ became well practiced at working in prisons. He reduced his equipment to a camera, a lens, a spare SD card and a spare battery to get through security checks as quick as was possible (often not quick at all).
The photographer’s good-standing all changed upon the release of his book Bumbata, an anthology of his best photographs from four years of shooting in Aiud Penitentiary. (Bumbuţ and I had an extended conversation about Bumbata in 2013).
The book was considered to gritty and perhaps, even, too sympathetic to the prisoners. Either way, it was seen as a damaging depiction. From there-on out, Bumbuţ was light on his feet and diplomatic. His access was never withdrawn.
The pregnant pause within these rooms is what gives Camera Intima strength as an body of work. We look at the photographs and they ignite our imaginations about what goes on inside. When the door is open — and we and the photographer peer in — there’s nothing to see. What goes on behind closed doors will never be photographed. This tension is characteristic of good photographic series that insert themselves into the relationships of public/private space and personal/institutional power.
“Prisoners are allowed officially to have sex inside an institution, but they have to follow all the bureaucratic steps,” explains Bumbuţ, “to write a request, to wait for the approval, to obey the rules.”
Guards and the administration hold the promise of access to the rooms as a carrot to motivate prisoners toward good behavior.
“Only prisoners who behave in prison are allowed to have private visits,” says Bumbuţ. “Prisoners are more obedient when they have access to the intimate rooms.”
Similarly, in the U.S., conjugal visits are seen as a very effective way to maintain prisoners’ complicity, even docility. Not all U.S. prisoners enjoy regular time with their family or intimate partners. All conjugal visits are banned within the Federal system and while states are left to rule on their own prison policies, only four — California, Connecticut, New York and Washington — currently allow trailer visits. In 2014, both Mississippi and New Mexico summarily ended their conjugal visit programs.
Sometimes these decisions will be couched in language about security but more often than not the decision rests upon public opinion (outrage), the moral judgements of the administration in power and probably the bottom line. It’s cheaper to keep men and women locked in boxes than it is to provide programming.
Back in Romania, it doesn’t matter what system or prison you’re in, your right to have conjugal visits is protected by law. And Bumbuţ was in many prisons when these visits took place. For a while he toyed with the idea of making portraits of prisoners and visitors.
“I even shot a couple before and after their private visit,” says Bumbuţ. “But when I looked at the portrait, I realised that it became too much about the couple and not about the intimate room.”
Bumbuţ wanted to spark our curiosity. He wanted to focus on the space and all the emotions, release, frustrations, love and contained freedom they embody.
Even though these rooms allow two humans to come together, they’re not places about individuals or individuality. They’re function spaces for the continuance of criminal justice policy. We know that given the choice, no-one would want to opt for these converted cells, cramped quarters or side-thought accommodations for their sexy time. No, Bumbuţ’s photographs are all about the denial of comfort and personal circumstance. These are compromise spaces. They’re about making do as much as they are about making out and they reveal carceral logic itself.
“So I decided to shoot the empty rooms.”
If you’re still with my these 1,300 words later, I’m glad you stayed the course and I hope I’ve convinced you that these images are more than visual one-liners. That, in fact, by photographing in every Romanian prison — 40 in total — Bumbuţ has created a unique, complete and priceless sociological survey. These four walls are the fulcrum between Romanian rule-of-law and the European Union compact; they’re the pivot of negotiation between prison and prisoner; and, of course, they’re containers for sexual expression between prisoners and loved ones. Ultimately, the rooms are the physical manifestation of contradiction.
“These are spaces for intimacy,” concludes Bumbuţ. “But, at the same time, the prison itself denies almost all desperately needed intimacy.”
In recent years, Cosmin Bumbuț and journalist Elena Stancu have traveled through Romania in an RV telling stories about today Romania, marginal communities and extraordinary people. They are Teleleu.eu. Follow Bumbuț and Stancu at the Teleleu.eu website and on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Photobook “Best-Of” lists sprout like wild-cakes this time of year. Among selections, we are not always guaranteed variety, but we are guaranteed quantity.
Aperture tends to preempt many of the main runners and riders in the autumn with its shortlists for the Aperture/Paris Photo Book Awards (30 books total). Then the deluge beings.
A deluge that which Photolia has made an inventory. It’s a list of Photobook “Best-Of-2013” lists; a list of 80+ lists!
Furthermore, QT Luong at Terra Galleria has taken all the individual titles of those 80+ lists, broke down the votes and constructed a meta-list that cumulates each book’s number of votes. Some titles have votes in double figures, and the “winner” Lieko Shiga’s Rasen Kaigan has 22 votes.
By years end, Best-Of lists had been written and checked twice by Wired, American Photo, Time, Mother Jones, New York Times, Dazed Digital, Lens Culture, Washington Post, Brain Pickings, Tom Claxton, Microcord, Eric Gundersen, Conscientious, Tim Clark, Monsters & Madonnas, Valerian and Discipline and Disorder just to name a few.
The Guardian made two lists — one for best indie books and one for offerings by established photobook publishers. Not to mention Alec Soth and Martin Parr‘s eagerly anticipated annual dispatches. Roger May shifted the formula and picked his favorite book purschases . The Artists Book Cooperative maintained their cheeky approach with the year’s worst photobooks.
So what does all this mean? Head to Blake Andrew’s analysis of the best of the “Best-Of photobook lists. Hilarious.
Well, who am I to reject this ubiquity of Photobook “Best-Of” lists? A few weeks ago, I was asked by Photo Eye to name my highlights for the PhotoEye Best Photobooks 2013 feature. I picked seven titles. Here they are. And, below they are.
Bumbata, Cosmin Bumbuţ (Punctum)
Beyond the prison subject matter which is, of course, very appealing to me, Cosmin Bumbuţ’s book is the best of design with beautiful binding, a punctured front cover, and thoughtful essay. Those elements compliment pictures that are, frankly, some of the closest, least judgmental I have seen of incarcerated peoples. Bumbuţ spent 3 years visiting a single prison. The portrait he paints is of a closed but relatively stable environment with equal representation. Staff and prisoners feature in similar amounts. The variety and color is something beyond that of most American prison photographers. Here is a documentarian who has worked hard to form an understanding with his subjects.
In December, I spoke at length with Bumbuţ about his project and the book.
Tales From The City Of Gold, Jason Larkin (Kehrer Verlag)
It is astonishing that with such a distinct and consistent approach to image-making that this is Jason Larkin’s first monograph. His work seems so familiar. Once more, the Englishman Larkin has entered (with his 4×5) a peculiar faraway place with peculiar and depressing social and environmental history. Johannesburg is one of the world’s most successful mining cities but waste dumps litter the landscape. South Africans have built communities in the mines’ hinterlands. The price of gold is spiking and the lives of people who live and work in the region is tied to our global commodities market. Larkin casts a curious but not a judgmental eye over our priorities at the dusty and noisy point at which commerce and daily life intersect.
Photojournalists On War, Mike Kamber (University of Texas Press)
End of year lists often prioritize photo books with fancy design elements; books that are small run, hand-sewn delicate things. But what about those books about photography that are a bit bigger? What about books put out by a large press, such as UT Press, say? And what about books with more text than image? Photojournalists On War is a brick of a book. Mike Kamber interviewed 89 photographers who covered the War on Iraq. If we are to understand the nature of that flawed conflict then we should pay attention to the journalists whose activities were meant to makes sense of it at the time; make sense of it for us. But, what sense do they make of it now? By virtue of the breadth of opinion and depth of questions, Photojournalists On War is THE reference book for any discussion of the War on Iraq and photography. In much the same way as Photographs Not Taken in 2012 delivered us personal reflections and new entry points to photographic thinking, so Photojournalists On War in 2013 surprises and delights with the first-hand and imperfect narratives. Truth is not usually found in a photograph, but perhaps it can be found in a photographer’s words?
Swell, Mateusz Sarello (Instytut Kultury Wizualnej)
Sea foam smells, threatening birds, big clouds. Swell is a rough experience. As was Mateusz Sarello’s break-up. This book is in two halves. Each half is a visit to the Baltic Sea — the first with his girlfriend, and the second without as part of some therapeutic turn. So different are the images and mood of the images it’s effectively two books in one. Both books’ exposed spines reflect the vulnerability Sarello has embraced in creating a book about his crushed love-life. 88 pages of fragile hand-made loveliness. Handle with care. Given the proliferation of east-of-Western-Europe sea photography projects (think Petrut Calinescu, Rafal Milach, Mila Teshaeiva, Mikhail Mordasov and even Rob Hornstra), it’s tricky to do something novel in this sub-sub-genre, but Sarello pulls it off with focus on the hyperpersonal. And he’s not afraid to use Instax Fujifilm either. I was skeptical at first, but later blown over by the earnestness of the well-edited and understated grouping of images.
Rasen Kaigan, Lieko Shiga (AKAAKA)
Between 2006 and 2012, Lieko Shiga lived and worked in the region of northeast Japan worst hit by the 2011 Tsunami. Shiga is part photographer and part conceptual artist, so it makes sense that these images (many of which abandon formal photographic considerations) look nothing like the photojournalism we saw in the aftermath of the Tsunami. Darkness, hard-flash, plants, flowers, sweaters, sand and minerals. It’s all very earthy … and strange. But then again, that region is a geography and a collective psychology transformed. Despite Shiga’s camera experiments, we are still presented images of Japanese communities on the mend, making do, building up, tilling the land and doing the simple things that they must. Big disasters are met with small victories. Shiga’s volatile approach is a reminder that the uncomplicated things she photographs only exist because of massive tectonic force.
What might be otherwise read as an assault on the senses is a celebration of the senses — a celebration of life and of living.
Control Order House, Edmund Clark (HERE Press)
The images are boring; but the concept is exhilarating — which is exactly the point. Edmund Clark photographed the interior of a “home” inhabited by a UK terror suspect under house arrest. A dull suburban 3-bed semi in no-name Britain. Clark worked within pre-agreed, tightly controlled parameters set out by the UK Home Office. Clark and HERE Press include scans of his contracts and official correspondence. The act and the access is more important than the images; the images are only evidence that Clark made a sortie into this never photographed territory before. (In April, I wrote about Control Order House for Wired.)
So many projects these days comment on control from the outside, but here we see images from from within, and according to, control.
Two Rivers, Carolyn Drake (Self-published)
Carolyn Drake’s photography has long impressed me, so I’m not surprised her first book is a triumph. Dutch book-designer Sybren Kuiper brought considerable style to Two Rivers. Apparently, it was Kuiper who proposed starting the book’s sequence at where the two rivers appear to end versus Drake’s original idea to begin where the rivers originate high in the mountains. Drake has visited the vast expanse of central Asia that lies between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers 15 or more times in recent years. Judging by the images, it remains a region that beguiles Drake. Two Rivers abandons traditional documentary sequencing and reveals the creators own feelings, uncertainties, awe and brief encounters. One slimmer book is words and notes for the chapters in the other larger book containing pictures of fuzzy narrative, refused objectivity and love. The wrap of images around the Japanese style bound pages is stunning.
A couple of months ago, photographer Cosmin Bumbuț contacted me out of the blue and asked if I’d look over his new book Bumbata. I was aware of Cosmin and his work because of the photography workshop he initiated in Targsor women’s penitentiary in Romania in 2009. However, I was not aware of his long term project documenting life inside a Romanian men’s prison. He made photographs in Aiud Penitentiary between 2005 and 2008.
Bumbata — which is a Romania slang term for “prison” — was awarded the Book Art Object Award at the Romanian National Book Design Awards last month. The book paints a portrait of hard life in prison with variation, colour and curiosity. It is a stunning object; thoughtfully designed and brimming with crisp, images full of intimacy, unexpected interactions and (it sounds strange to say) disarming hope. Bumbata is one of my books of the year. You all should get a copy.
During Romania’s Communist era, Aiud Penitentiary was as a site of subjugation and abuse against political prisoners. Since Romania joined the European Union, conditions in Romanian prisons have improved greatly but the country’s overall prison population is growing.
Scroll down for a Q&A with Bumbuț.
Prison Photography (PP): Congratulations on the book. How did it develop? Did you release any of the images online or have them published in print before the book?
Cosmin Bumbuț (CB): Some of the portraits of prisoners that I shot in 2005 were published in the Romanian edition of Elle Man in 2006. In the same year, I won at the International Photography Awards with these portraits. I have not published the photographs online until now because I wanted to complete the final selection and find the flow of the story. I had 15,000 images and difficulties editing them. I did not like the flow of the pictures from the layout drafts I was working on. The book looked like a classic photo album, but I wanted more. I stopped shooting at Aiud in 2008 but it wasn’t until 2011 that I was satisfied with a selection.
During my last visit at Aiud, I found a file labeled ‘Literary Works of Prisoners’ in the office of the Social Reintegration staff. I read some works on the spot and took pictures of the rest thinking I might use them. I also photographed the prison magazine called Light From The Dark, which at that time was handwritten and stapled in one hard copy.
While I was editing the photos for the 1000th time, I read a text which made me think that prisoners’ texts might be binder for my photos. After this point, it was much simpler. I finished the layout quickly using InDesign which I learned in order to be able to make the design for my own book – the project was really important for me, so I wanted to make the book on my own.
PP: How did the book realise it’s final form?
CB: I printed three copies at Blurb, just so I could film them and try to raise the money for printing through a crowdfunding campaign. After I successfully completed the crowdfunding campaign I realized that I underestimated the printing costs.
CB: Two weeks before the completion of the crowdfunding campaign, I had the idea to make a hole in the cover, a hole that leads to the idea of the eye (sight) of a cell door. I remade the whole layout of the book because of this and I started looking for a printing house that could make this cover. Eventually, I managed this with the help of Atelier Fabrik – great people who never once said “It can’t be done.” The last minute changes of the layout and print cost more money which I paid for from my own pocket.
PP: How do you describe the book to people who have not opened it?
CB: Inside the prison walls, people laugh, play, sing, watch TV, read or write. Prisoners rebuild new homes inside and have created a micro-society with its own rules and functions. Bumbata reveals an intimate perspective of this micro-society. There are libraries, art and theater but many photos are in cells or on the yard.
PP: What’s life like inside Aiud? What sort of rehabilitation programs exist? How are the prisoners’ days occupied?
CB: They are not busy at all. Not all of them are allowed to work or are willing to work, although they are released sooner if they do. Most of them “sit on the room”, as they say, and hang around watching TV or talking. There are not too many volunteers for the activities you are talking about – I met men sentenced to four years of prison who could reduce their conviction with a few months if they would work, but they preferred to lay.
After 2007, when private visits were made law, there was a noticeable difference in mood and spirit. Prisoners were allowed to receive packages from their families; they received better food; they did not have to wear uniforms any longer; and guards were not allowed to beat them.
Once Romania joined the European Union, in 2007, the whole prison system went through major revamp and the biggest reform was to introduce the right to private visits. This means that a prisoner who is married or in a relationship has the right to receive, every three months, a two-hour private visit which takes place in a separate room inside the prison compound. Plus, if a prisoner gets married in detention he or she can spend 48 hours with the spouse in the special room and is allowed visits once a month in the first year of marriage. In such a context I started photographing the first couples to enjoy the new rights inside the Aiud prison.
So, a side project is called Private Visits Room. I have photographed 34 rooms in almost all the Romanian penitentiaries. I do not know yet what am I going to do with this project.
PP: Prisoners are happier then?
CB: They are aware of their rights and this has made them more “courageous” in their relationships with the guards. I am not sure if that is right or wrong. Some of them eat and live better inside a prison than they did in their own homes – they have hot water and warm rooms.
PP: I really enjoyed Hungarian writer Attila Bartis‘ musing on freedom in the introduction to Bumbata. He describes YOU as free; free from expectation, free from dogma of the medium; free to explore. Is he right?
CB: If he describes me that way, he must know something! Atilla writes that I am not “constrained by documentation nor by shocking.” I spent more than three years taking pictures in Aiud and during this time I witnessed all sorts of happy, sad and even absurd events. I tried to get close to the prisoners and to photograph them without any exaggeration, without making them look like monsters or victims, but exactly the way they were: mockers, ostentatious, nostalgic or God-fearing. So in that sense, Attila is right – I was not constrained by documentation nor by shocking. I was free to observe unspectacular everyday life in prison.
Attila and I have been friends since 2010. I met him when I published his photo portfolio in Punctum magazine. I read his novel, Tranquility, all in a breath and after that I wrote to him, telling how much I enjoyed his photographic descriptions. I knew that he was also a very good photographer, so I interviewed him for Punctum magazine.
PP: Can you tell us about Punctum?
CB: I launched Punctum in December 2009 in Romania. Until Punctum, there was no magazine dedicated exclusively to photography in Romania. I wanted to launch a printed magazine because I missed photographs’ consistence and I wanted to educate the public and prove that photography means more than technical information, exposure compensation, shutter and ISO. I found a sponsor who could take care of the contributors’ fees and printing costs. I volunteered my time.
Punctum encouraged diversity and presented different kind of artists: renowned photographers from Romania, but also young students, pictures taken by prisoners from Targsor (the women that attended my workshop), but also portfolios of photographers from New York, Japan, Cuba and Hungary. Additionally, it recovered the history of Romanian photography and published documentaries about photographers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who were hardly known by the public. Each issue presented a photographic portfolio of a famous writer, director, painter or a violinist interested in photography, for example Bartis.
But after five issues (the magazine appeared quarterly with a circulation of 1,000 copies) I realized that I did not have the abilities to sell this magazine and make it profitable. After all, I am just a photographer, not a business man.
PP: Bumbata is of men’s prisons, but you also coordinated workshops in the Targsor women’s prison. Were these projects pursued at the same time?
CB: No, I held the workshop in Targsor women’s prison a year after I finished shooting in Aiud.
In Targsor, I chose six prisoners and I gave each a camera so that they could photograph inside. Of course, I needed special approvals for this. I taught them basic settings and concepts during one visit each week. The workshop lasted for two months. While I was there, I was downloading their pictures and explaining to them how could they improve and what they should shoot the next week.
PP: Did you do a similar workshop with the men in Aiud?
CB: I never held a photo workshop in Aiud. Actually, Ms. Raducanu from the Social Reintegration Department was supportive of the idea, but a workshop needed some special approvals from the National Administration of Prisons.
PP: How long have you been interested in prisons?
CB: Since 2005, when the National Administration of Prisons got in contact with me and offered me access in any Romanian prison. They had seen my photo album Transit. I told them I want to pick only one penitentiary. In order to do that, I visited several and then chose the one in Aiud, which I did for visual reasons: the old cellular system with small detention rooms.
PP: Who helped you secure access?
CB: Dana Cenusa, the spokeswoman of the National Administration of Prisons, helped me and secured my access anywhere inside the prison system.
PP: The guards uniform interests me. Why the balaclava hood?
CB: According to the law, prisoners inside maximum security facilties that are convicted for murder, drug trafficking or cruelty deeds are accompanied everywhere by guards wearing balaclava hoods.
PP: Your work was exhibited and prisoners were escorted to the gallery by guards. What was the event like?
CB: I did not organize the exhibition. An art gallery from the city in collaboration with the penitentiary did so. I was touched by the encounter of the detainees with their families, wives and children.
PP: What are the attitudes toward prison and prisoners in Romania?
CB: Generally speaking, it is a controversial subject. Prisoners or former prisoners are considered the scumbags of the Romanian society. I was often asked what am I doing in the prison – have I not found anything more beautiful to photograph than the prisoners? I think that the bad image of the prisoners inside the Romanian society was one of the reasons why National Administration of Prisons asked me if I want to take photos inside the prisons. Maybe they thought that the fashion photographer in me could rehabilitate the image of the prisoners?!
PP: You explain that the prisoners appreciated the Polaroids and printed photos you gave them. How do you define photographs value within prison?
CB: They all want to send photos of them to their families. Because photo cameras are forbidden inside the prison, the value of a printed photo is priceless. They will be released and they will go back home. Prisoners are afraid of being forgotten – so the photographs helped them to remind their families of their existence.
PP: What were the prisoners expectations of photography and of you making images in their prison? Did they think you’d hit the news or sell images for big money across the globe? What was their understanding of your work?
CB: Some of them understood my work, others did not. They kept asking me what I was going to do with the images and I answered them that I will do an exhibition and, probably, a book. After Elle Man published the photos, I became famous inside the prison. They all wanted to be photographed because they have seen that my pictures were not denigrating them. After that, they trusted me.
PP: What did the staff think of your project?
CB: They wondered why I did not have something better to do with my time and money! But as I had all the approvals from National Administration of Prisons, what could they possible do to me, a mad man?!
PP: You did three years. How did you know when the shooting stage of the project was done?
CB: I wanted to finish with a prisoner’s release, so Pricu’s release ended the project. I knew before that I had come to an end. I felt I had become too visible – all the prisoners knew me and wanted me to photograph them. I could not pass unnoticed anymore. So, I took a break until I found out that Pricu was going to be released. I went to Aiud and spent the last two weeks only with him.
PP: What’s next?
CB: Recently, I won the The Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism together with the journalist Elena Stancu and the next year I will travel around the country working on a multimedia project about the culture of education by violence in the Romanian families and society.
PP: Thanks Cosmin and congratulations on the impressive book!
CB: Thank you, Pete
BIOGRAPHY
Cosmin Bumbuț studied at the Faculty of Journalism Bucharest, and later studied photography at the Academy of Theatre and Film. For the last 18 years, Bumbuț has been a freelance photographer. His fashion stories and reportage has been published in Elle, Esquire, Marie Claire, Tabu, Cosmopolitan, FHM, Dilema and Viva! He worked as a photographer for Nottara Theater and Today newspapers. Between 1997-1998 he was a professor at the Academy of Theatre and Film.
Bumbuț has worked on advertising campaigns for Vodafone, ING Bank, Procter&Gamble, Wella, Epson, Coca-Cola Romania, Marriott Hotels and Mercedes-Benz Romania. to name a few. He was awarded The Best Fashion Photographer, Pantene Beauty Awards (2002), The Best Advertising Photo (Ad’Or Festival, 2001) and Best Advertising Photo (AdPrint Festival 1996). In 2006, he won the International Photography Award for a series of photographic portraits of convicts from Aiud Penitentiary.
In 1999, Bumbuț co-founded the photo group 7 Days and organized a series of workshops and photo camps. He co-authored the photographic album 7 Zile – 7 Ani in Maramures “7 Days – 7 Years in Maramures” (Humanitas, 2007). His book Transit (Humanitas, 2002) won the Art Book of the Year Award awarded by the Romanian Publishers’ Association.
Between 2009 and 2010, Bumbuț published Punctum, Romania’s only magazine dedicated solely to art photography. Bumbuț’s photographs have been exhibited in New York, Amsterdam, Luxembourg, Thessaloniki, Madrid, Rome, Warsaw and Naples to name a few.
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At Lenscratch
Fourteen female prisoners at Tirgsor Prison in Romania participated in a six-camera workshop led by Cosmin Bumbuţ.
The workshop was suggested by a Miss Raducanu (presumably the warden), and Cosmin Bumbuţ took up the initiative. Bumbuţ gained sponsorship from f64 and insisted that – after basic training – the women be left unsupervised with the cameras for the duration of the project.
Bumbut: “I received six Canon PowerShot cameras that I took with me to Tirgsor in July. The cameras worried me, they had so many buttons and the manual was so complex that I was skeptical that anyone could use them; I, for one, wasn’t able to. I felt very nervous.”
Over a two month period the group captured 14,000 images. 395 were chosen for the final exhibition and 95 can be seen in an online gallery at Punctum (Romanian language). Here is a Google translation.
I’ve picked out 12 images.
This is a marvelous project. I would like to see more photography used as rehabilitation in prisons. I have a colleague who uses video in an ethnological framework and the men really benefit from the novel educational approach.
This Romanian project is similar to the pinhole photography of the girls of Remann Hall here in Washington State.
Finally, it is worth saying that Bumbut was inspired by Klavdij Sluban‘s prison workshops which he has conducted across the globe.
Prison Photography 