Thank God Romania is full of that kind of things.
One of the good things when it comes to making these "series type articles" is that you've gotta make a minimum of 2 episodes. Not a lot of work there if I'd consider to shut off any kind of series approached, anytime after. If there are at least two episodes, it's a series, fuck off! If there will not be a new episode after the second one is because of reasons. I'm not Netflix, alright?
So yeah! I'm gathering these "things", though they might be people sometimes. For some reason, putting them in the bowl of "things" comes easy once I manage to take that shot in the middle of their agenda.
Like corn after harvest or hay gathered on a long blazing day, up in the tractor, coming from work on the fields. Throwing some big, toothless smiles back at me. Me, another idiot, shooting my camera through the windshield. Hard to imagine their work day. The fields are so treeless around these parts that I can only imagine the amount of Sun they've taken in.
I decided I'll gather things, count 6 of them and then, make an article about it. I've collected these 6 shots for some time now. I delete a lot. I'm ruthless with my work. Not only copies or frames were taken when the shutter button is continuously pressed. No. I delete whole compositions by the hundreds. For this kind of article, the most important is the luck aspect.
Who would've thought that I'll run into these cows, bathing in the afternoon, clouded sky, when I was pointed by the policeman to go right instead of straight ahead because down the road there was some flooding? I didn't! But sure as hell I pulled the car on the side, told the kid to stay put (though she was tied like a madman in a restraining shirt, in her chair) and went for the "Muddy Milka Girls" shot.
Do you ever get the impression, when driving, that you managed to get to your mindset destination, but you have no fucking clue how you got there? It happened to me so many times (when driving in my hometown or Bucharest) that I'm sometimes getting anxious about it.
After each and every rain (and I've told you many times now that we do get a lot of rain lately) these snails, stubborn as mules, think they can cross the sidewalk in front of my building. They are in pretty high numbers (5 on a 15-meter sidewalk) and I always see them struggling to cross the asphalt. It's asphalt guys. You shouldn't be here. Go check for soil. You and your slimy trail...
Sometimes I step on them by accident :( I only hear that crack and I know what I did. WHY ARE YOU THERE? You shouldn't be there. I didn't want to do that.
I started to collect selectively for some time now. I mean, I got to make a plastic recycle bin and I managed to convince my family to do at least that. We don't do that on a large scale in Romania. We are savages I tell you. And it's not that some of us wouldn't want to do it but even if you want to do it, the infrastructure for this is so precarious or sometimes useless.
Where do you put a lamp that you've just taken down from the ceiling while redoing the painting or who knows what? On top of the dumpster is a great place, especially when it's raining and I'm with the camera on me (I'm always with the camera on me, don't take me serious). Don't know if this thing shouldn't be here... I kind of liked this composition, with the dumpster underneath the thing that is being replaced. Some real shot reinterpretation of the famous "abandoned lamp" animation of Pixar.
Being a countryside raised kid I had the opportunity to eat a lot of things out of their green roots, one way or another. I was picking up everything for myself and sometimes stealing fruit I didn't have in my own yard, from some neighbours. Like May cherries. I only had June cherries and those were a month late than my craving. But I never had enough berries. And when I say "berry", I mean those dark ones, the wild ones that grow out to be these bushes, full of needles. We didn't have this in the yard and the only source was some green fence made out of these, some hundred meters away from my house. All the kids in the village were wrestling for that bush so rarely I would get to eat enough to make me burp!
Picking up berries from inside the core of an oil refinery, now that's something you wouldn't expect to hear. And they're fucking tasty and sweet when they ripe. And now I can eat as many as I want because they just grow wild, next to my HQ, hanging on some fence and breathing in the chemicals in the air.
Such sad stories from Greece. I love that country and the fact that they are so close to us, geographically, makes me feel very attached to them. I also work for a greek company and I've visited some good part of and I met a lot of incredible people. Greeks are an incredible people and the fact that we still can't avoid such catastrophes in 2018 makes me feel powerless.
But now that I hear about some fires in Berlin area I can't help and avoid having an image with a small, creepy Putin playing with matches in the forest close to Athens and Berlin :)
Meanwhile, we have our own arsons. The funny thing is that they usually put fire very close to their home, in the idea that it's easier to "cut the grass with fire". Moreover, there's this myth about ashes enriching the soil, I guess. Nonetheless.
Until the next "Things that shouldn't be there" say "hello" to the camera.
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