Ioana Vrabie is a well travelled international photographer known
for shooting mesmeric multiple exposure analogue images that at a first
glance look "wrong".
Her images arrest the viewers and invite them
to look deeper and deeper into their layers to achieve a state of
profound presence typical of the analogue era and break free from the
hectic scrolling and sweeping of digital images on portable devices.
Born in Transylvania, Ioana Vrabie grew up in Tuscany, Italy.
Being
a mix between two opposite cultures, her original communist one and her
new capitalistic one, propelled her to travel extensively and develop
an inquisitive approach towards life. She had to search for her own
personal truth and identity through questioning what was right and what
was wrong since an early age.
She showed an early inclination
towards writing, arts and crafts, especially collage and mixed media,
winning a few local prizes.
At the age on sixteen her grandfather
gifted her with a Zorki 6 (the Eastern European version of Leica II)
and her love for photography started.
It was only in her late
twenties that she decided, after travelling the world as flight
attendant and being exposed to the variety of the World for almost a
decade, to study photography at University of Arts London and take her
passion to the next level.
She started to work as digital commercial photographer –she was not
very happy with the long hours spent on retouching - and at
Photofusion, a camera club that kept alive her old love for analogue.
There
she received a providential gift from a stranger: a bag full of
expired film rolls that she took together with her analogue camera on a
long trip to Italy, India and Bali in search of a capturing "a reality
that does not need retouching".
During this trip she
felt overwhelmed by the beauty of her surroundings and she
instinctively started to allow her eyes to wander and her body to move
through space, and shoot multiple exposure images, feeling a deep sense
of liberation arising from overlapping different perspectives on the
same film frame. Her signature style and the series Eyescapes was born.
The inner conflict that she experienced in her personal life
transpires into her work: the fact that she lived suspended between two
different and overlapped realities is mirrored into her photographs
that represent a third reality she’s always been looking for.
After living in Romania, Italy and UK and travelling around the World, she is currently based in Barcelona, Spain.
