“10/1“ is a short photo series that only consists of ten pictures of one-room apartments and their owners or tenants, respectively. The said apartments are identical and located in the same 10-floor apartment block in Eastern Bucharest. Like many others this block was also built in the 1960s – in an era where the Communist state was aiming to extinguish human individuality.
As Romanian photographer Bogdan Gîrbovan shows with his photo series, this plan fortunately failed miserably. Because in spite of their same size and room layout, the apartments that have been photographed are as different as the people inhabiting them. Each one is a world of its own.
Beyond that, Gîrbovan demonstrates with his photos how important context actually is in photography and how trivial format-filling portraits are in comparison. You can’t reduce complex human-beings only to their faces without neglecting their meaningfulness when doing so.
1. floor
2. floor 3. floor
4. floor
5. floor
6. floor
7. floor
8. floor
9. floor
10. floor (Bogdan Gîrbovan)
© Bogdan Gîrbovan
You can find more pictures by Bogdan Gîrbovan on his website.