Ramin Mazur on places where language, identity, and belonging are unstable

Chișinău-based photographer Ramin Mazur’s long-term practice examines place, vernaculars, and everyday life beyond dominant narratives

Images that circulate widely on social media play a decisive role in shaping how social and political realities are produced, perceived, and contested. Far from being neutral, these images contribute to the formation of cultural and territorial identities, reinforcing dominant narratives while also holding the potential to disrupt, reframe, and resist them.

Within this context, Der Greif “Local Voices” continues to foreground situated perspectives and collaborative authorship as a way of slowing down image circulation and re-embedding images within their social, cultural, and political conditions. Through an ongoing exercise in co-writing, the project examines how visual practices can counter homogenizing narratives and support more plural, democratic forms of representation by insisting on specificity, locality, and dialogue, foregrounding situated knowledge over dominant or centralized narratives.

In conversation with Ramin Mazur, we discuss the limitations of conventional photojournalistic circulation, the ethics of representation, and the role of personal relationships in documentary work. The interview also addresses questions of visual language and the function of archives in contexts with limited photographic infrastructure, and whether documentary practices can counter simplified or homogenizing media narratives.

Mazur is a documentary photographer based in Moldova whose practice sits between classical photojournalism and an evolving engagement with photography as a critical, research-based medium. A graduate of the Journalism Department at Moldova State University in Chișinău, Mazur began his career working as a photo reporter for national print outlets before shifting towards long-term, independent projects. In 2013, he participated in the Magnum Foundation’s Human Rights and Photography Fellowship, after which his work increasingly focused on sustained observation and self-reflective documentary practice across Moldova and neighbouring countries undergoing political and social transition.

Ilaria Sponda: I’m really interested in your perspective on circulation: what it means to you to try to circulate your work, and what it means for your work to be seen.

Ramin Mazur: Circulation is a problem, I must say. I’ve always felt that I’m not the kind of person who actively tries to figure out how to circulate my work. At some point, I realized I’d rather not put a full stop on a project when it feels “finished.” I prefer to keep working, to let something continue rather than closing it off. Out of that came a different logic of making: instead of defining a small project at the beginning, I extend it over time and only later see what emerges from it. This approach also shaped some of the things I was working on that moved away from classical documentary photography projects based on screen images, for example. During the COVID-19 pandemic and during the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, I have always been photographing screens rather than scenes. It became a way of capturing time itself. I would work for two or three months, and that felt enough. Only after that duration would I allow myself to mark a kind of endpoint. So circulation, for me, is always tied to this hesitation around finality when something is complete enough to be shown, and whether it ever really needs to be.

IS: What sparked your interest in local politics of place and belonging in the first place?

RM: At the beginning I was working as a journalist, straight after university, without really knowing what photography could be beyond doing assignments. I was shooting all the time, responding to what was happening around me, but not really questioning my position inside it. I was working in Moldova, in Russian-language-based media, moving through places where language, identity, and belonging are already very unstable. I didn’t fully belong somewhere yet. Through journalism, I was constantly dealing with “local stories,” but they were framed in a very social way, later understanding that the media environment I was part of was not fully appreciating photography, understanding it as evidence supporting texts.

IS: And how did this realization impacted your practice?

RM: At some point there was a constant sense of polarization. It was everywhere. That became one of the main topics of those years, even if later it felt like it was forgotten or pushed aside. That polarization made me realize that I needed to focus more on myself and on the region I live in, even if it wouldn’t necessarily bring success or visibility. I was thinking a lot about representation, about the international photography industry, and how you are expected to position yourself. Either you do something very long and deep so it becomes interesting over time, or you do something very short and extremely specific, something no one has focused on before. Those felt like the two acceptable options. But there was also another possibility, which was simply staying and trying to cultivate something from within. That decision pushed me to constantly revisit my archive. Since I didn’t have an art or photography education, not even in photojournalism really, going back became a way of understanding what I had been paying attention to without realizing it. I could see patterns, interests, moments that I had noticed unconsciously and then forgotten. For example, I noticed that I had photographed the same playground five times over the years. That made me stop and think: why did I keep returning to this place? And then it felt obvious that this was something worth continuing, because over time you begin to see how these spaces change, and how your own way of looking changes with them.

IS: Where did this leave you in relation to the broader photography world in Moldavia?

RM: Because I didn’t have a formal education in art or photography, there was no bridge for me between generations of photographers. I was exploring everything on my own, with the feeling that nothing existed before, which of course wasn’t true. In Moldova especially, there is a break in continuity. For a long time I thought nothing had happened in the 1990s, but later I understood that a lot did happen. It was just absorbed into archives that were never really activated or made visible.

IS: Has the absence of sustained photographic mediation contributed to photography being framed largely as a commercial practice in Moldavia?

RM: Without access to a shared history or dialogue, photography risks being reduced to either commercial production or passive archiving. Commercial photography follows the market, that logic is clear. But for practices that are not commercial, visibility requires constant effort, otherwise there is a rupture in how images circulate and how they are understood. For me, part of the problem is that photography is often confused with “the image.” Images have existed for thousands of years, while photography is less than two hundred years old. Photography carries a specific relationship to time, to reality, to evidence. And now, with the rise of AI, that distinction becomes even more fragile. Photography has traditionally functioned as a form of proof, a way of saying this existed, this happened. When that role is destabilized, it becomes even more important to understand photography not just as content, but as a practice with its own history, responsibility, and limits.

IS: How does a project like “Transnistria” reflect a sense of responsibility in representing a place that is already heavily mediated and often misrepresented?

RM: For me, it was never about trying to discover Transnistria as a political subject or a territory to explain. I wasn’t striving to uncover something new there. At some point I realized I was just repeating the same narratives. So I asked myself a much simpler question: what is Transnistria for me? The answer was my hometown. Once I understood that, everything shifted. It stopped being about this pseudo state, about statalist narratives or geopolitical symbolism. It became about the place where I grew up, where my childhood happened, and where somehow my memories felt blocked or inaccessible. I had lived there for years when you should accumulate memories, but when I returned, I realized they were missing or fragmented. It was about returning to a place that had been slowly left behind. “Left “not only because it is on the left bank of the Dniester, but because people left it. I left it. My brother left. My mother left. Other family members stayed, but even they were often living elsewhere, in capitals, in other countries. The place was defined by absence as much as by presence. So my engagement there wasn’t driven by image making. I went back to spend time with relatives, to sit with my aunt, my cousins, and my grandmother. Sometimes I took photographs, but often I didn’t. This went on for years. Going back, leaving, coming back again. Photography emerged slowly, almost accidentally, from that rhythm.

IS: Drawing on geographer and academic Yves Guermond’s observation that “territorial identity, which is initially an individual feeling restricted to a small area, is instrumentalised politically, via a change of scale, in order to construct regional or national identities,” how do you position your work in relation to this process?

RM: Transnistria is a clear example of how a lived, local attachment is scaled up and instrumentalised politically. Internationally, and increasingly within Moldova itself, the region is framed either as a threat or as a geopolitical problem to be solved. Earlier, it was treated as an exotic post-Soviet anomaly. In all cases, the place is spoken about from the outside. What gets lost is everyday life. Transnistria is rarely acknowledged as a place where people simply live. Borders used to be porous, people moved freely, and political negotiations had little to do with daily realities. Today the narrative is more rigid, and those who remain are often reduced to stereotypes, even though most are elderly people or relatives of those who have already left. My work tries to move in the opposite direction of this scaling up. Instead of reproducing symbolic or national narratives, I return to the individual level, to memory, absence, and lived experience, allowing the place to exist without being reduced to a political function. This is also why vernacular photography is so important to me. It stays close to what people actually are and what is happening here, without the urgency to export images elsewhere or turn them into symbols. It digs into everyday life rather than translating it for an external gaze. I’ve always been drawn to vernacular photography because it carries a different kind of truth, one that is quieter and less performative. In Moldova, there are meaningful initiatives working with this material, such as “Rama Albastră,” a project started by photographer Victor Organ and named after the blue frames traditionally painted around family photographs in villages. Through scanning and collecting images from private homes, especially from the Soviet period, these archives reveal realities that never appeared in official imagery. While public photographs showed factories, kindergartens, and ideological narratives, vernacular images preserved family life, intimacy, and self-representation. This kind of work shows a real hunger for images that belong to people rather than to power. It reinforces my belief that returning to the vernacular, to archives, and to lived experience is not nostalgic, but necessary, especially in places that are constantly spoken about but rarely listened to.

IS: Are you taking vernacular photography into your ongoing practice? And what directions are you interested in exploring in the near future?

RM: Right now, I’m mostly surrounded by unfinished projects. That’s kind of my natural state. One important moment recently was being part of the collective photobook “RAW Moldova,” which gathers street-based work from the country. It sold out very quickly, which was surprising, especially considering that locally there isn’t even a clear concept of the photobook. In Romanian, the closest term is still “photo album,” which belongs more to the nineteenth century than to contemporary photographic practice. So that response felt meaningful, even if the market itself is still very fragile. Alongside that, I’m continuing a long-term project around winter carnivals in the region, documenting masks and rituals. It’s slow and non-commercial work, something I return to occasionally. I’m also developing a more experimental project inspired by ideas around ecology. I work on it very sporadically, often shooting only on expired film that is decades old. It’s less about producing images and more about questioning our relationship to nature, especially the false separation between what we call “natural” and “unnatural.” I also keep returning to cities. I’m interested in urban margins, in how cities grow in layers, and what those layers reveal about how we live. Many of these works exist as sketches in my archive rather than finished projects. Some plans were interrupted by the pandemic, especially a longer journey through Balkan cities, but I see these projects as still open. For me, the next phase is less about finishing everything quickly and more about letting these threads mature in their own time.