We hit the road in order to capture the present Romania in images and words. We’re driving around the country by a caravan, trying to grasp the colorful, grey, developed, traditional, rural, industrial, rich and poor communities we come across on our way. We live on scholarships, collaborations and postcard subscriptions. In September 2013 we received a scholarship offered by the Rosalynn Carter Center and the Center for Independent Journalism to work on a topic concerning the Romanians’ habit of educating their sons and daughters by violence. And in June 2014 we were awarded one of the three Superwritings/Avon scholarships about domestic violence.

We like people and their stories, long ways and mornings when we have our coffee in beautiful scenery. For six years on end we’ve been telling the same stories by different means and we’ve been trying to confer color, flavor, sound and substance to the things that stir up our emotions. We worked together on reports for Marie Claire and Dilema Veche, we launched the Punctum magazine, the first publication in Romania dedicated exclusively to photographic projects, and we published Cuba continua, a book about the ordinary Cubans and the changes that confuse them.

Cosmin Bumbuţ & Elena Stancu

Cosmin Bumbuţ works as an independent photographer for over 20 years. He became famous for his fashion pictorials published in the magazines Elle, Marie Claire or Tabu and for the campaigns for Vodafone, Raiffeisen Bank, Epson or Coca-Cola. In the last few years his photo projects focused on the Romanian penitentiaries, the everyday life in Cuba and the marginal communities in Romania. His photo album about Aiud penitentiary, Bumbata, was awarded in 2013 the prize for object book at the National Design Contest and the award for the Most Beautiful Illustrated Book at Ready to Print Gala in 2014.

Elena Stancu works as a journalist for over 9 years; most of her reports were published in Marie Claire and Dilema Veche magazines. Her reports focused mainly on issues of today Romania: domestic violence, human trafficking, and the hardships faced by the families with children with autism and Down syndrome, the integration of the minorities. In 2013, she investigated the context of corruption in the Romanian medical system within a scholarship offered by the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence.

The press about us:

Simona Tache
Ziare.com
Dilema Veche
Dilema Veche
Cațavencii
Marie Claire
Horia Ghibuțiu
Adevărul