Cover for “Old Customs” by Chris Suspect
If this was a normal year, I would be prepping for my annual pilgrimage to the 9-day-long VSLO photo festival in Vama Veche, Romania, that occurs on the last two weekends in August. Vama Veche is a beautiful, magical place and if it wasn’t for COVID-19 and European travel restrictions I’d be on my way there next week.
On my first trip there in 2017 as a guest lecturer, I immediately fell in love with the festival and the small seaside village it is held in. Knowing the history of Romania and how Communism fell there in 1989, I was curious about the first generation of Romanians who did not have personal experience of what it was like to live under the rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Communist state. This curiosity stems from my own personal experience growing up in Moscow in the late 70s during the reign of Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. I recall how dark, bleak and miserable it was for a young person during that time. To be separated from this political ideology by the sliver of one generation was interesting to me so I decided to explore these ideas photographically.
By combining visual references to Romanian fairy tales, turn-of-the-century embroidery patterns, and scenes from a remote fishing village turned nontraditional tourist and party destination, I tried to capture the relationship the newer generation has with it’s country’s past, while embracing a new path and its promised freedoms. What is the friction between the new and the old, and can they work together? To ponder these questions in photographs may seem to be an impossible task, but images can allude to much more outside of the reality they depict.
It is within this framework that I present the idea of freedom and youth tethered to history, all in the style of a modern-day fairy tale filled with beauty, magic, myth, and mystery.
Photographed over 3 years, “Old Customs” is the third of four books I am publishing in 2020. This first edition has 46 full color photographs and a unique design featuring a printed translucent book jacket. All books purchased online are hand-numbered and signed. The book is ready for preorder now.