(Photographs taken in Bucharest, from 2009 to 2023.)

Andrei Becheru’s images possess an ethereal quality, a certain sense of otherworldliness. This holds true whether he is photographing moss, lichen, and tree trunks on a secluded mountaintop or taking snapshots of random things he sees in the streets, on the metro, or during his daily commute. In surrealist terminology, this approach may be dubbed voluntary blindness, in the sense that he seems to deliberately negate a certain reality principle, as to highlight the unreality of everyday life. 

In this excerpt from his ongoing visual diary, showcased for the very first time in the present issue of Draft, Becheru shares with us his experience of living in Bucharest and finding it exceedingly odd. His images capture this oddness: we see a lone worker in a spaghetti bowl of electrical cables, cotton-candy-like steam clouds hovering above a frozen cityscape, a mysterious blue-curtained box on a red stage, a crowd gathered in front of ghostly apartment blocks, or a small ferret taken out for a nighttime walk on a leash. Becheru’s images are closer to recollections than actual representations of things. Although technically speaking, all these images are documentary in nature, the sense I get is that it’s fiction. Maybe it’s because his sense of wander mirrors my own. Maybe it’s because the city offers up the most unexpected things to those prone to looking. Or maybe it’s because we truly live inside a dream, and only kid ourselves that we are awake. 

(Text by Cristian Drăgan)