From the city to the edge

I live in the Titan neighborhood, on Camil Ressu Boulevard. A car can only reach the staircase of my apartment block if it comes from Physicists' Alley, and a pedestrian's access, if coming from the boulevard, is much faster than a car. By bike it's about twenty-five minutes to downtown, and the route is almost a straight line. Diam diametrically opposite the city center, about five kilometers from where I live, the main road to the sea, the Autostrada Soarelui, begins.

Behind the block is the garbage dump - which is lockable - and next to it are parked cars, surrounded by a fence and the street. The fence is not continuous, as there is also a valley behind the block, which can be descended down steps. At the end of them is a parking lot "hugged" on one side by other blocks and on the other by houses, and a little further on by another wall, which encloses everything.

This latter wall is made of concrete and was assembled on site. It prevents people who want to get home from mixing with the cars in the nearby automobile range. This allows those training to become drivers to use the entire area of the polygon, bounded by the wall on part of its circumference, as well as trees, which form a different kind of wall, and the thermal power plant. Less than five hundred meters from the power station, the Dâmbovița river flows. Along the quay, seven kilometers further along the ring road, is a water treatment plant.

From here on, the landscape is composed of fields, assorted with rare houses or agricultural and mechanical installations, sheds, water towers, dirt roads, trees, buildings in the process of being erected. We are in a developing area, which does not (yet) meet the needs of the city's inhabitants, nor of those who have decided to live in houses in the hope that the chosen area will develop. There are uninhabited houses or houses under construction, often a single villa on an area of several hectares, residential blocks next to industrial facilities.

Method

The photographs were taken on 35 mm color film, as little digital processing as possible, as far as scanning. I used a normal 50mm lens in all the work, which allowed me to maintain unity in perspective and composition in general. The camera's stationing point was systematically frontal to the subject, several hundred meters away, and the height of the camera from the ground varied between 2 and 3 meters, again helping to give a more frontal approach to the subject. I shot at a closed aperture, with long exposure time (about 1/15), increasing the amount of detail. The light I worked in ranged between 7 and 9 in the morning, for an August day, and allowed for a nice sense of volume with moderate contrast.