tessa bunney
Hand to Mouth: A Journey through the Romanian Carpathians
Like many projects Hand to Mouth came about by chance. As I was driving home late one evening after running a workshop with young people, I heard a programme on Radio 4, Wild Europe, about how the lives of the traveling shepherds are affected by bears and wolves in the Romanian Carpathian Mountains. These few minutes were enough to inspire me to visit the shepherds and the landscape they worked in.
In June 2003, I arrived in Bucharest and took the twelve hour overnight train to Sighetu Marmatiei, the market town of the Maramures region, close to the Ukrainian border. As soon as I woke up in the early morning, we were travelling through a landscape of conical haystacks, where people were already at work scything before the heat of the day set in and I knew I would be back. Within four months I had raised funding to go back for a further trip from the European Cultural Foundation and Arts Council England.
I wanted to meet shepherds but by then it was November and they had come down from the mountains and the sheep were back in the villages with their owners. So I spent the time visiting local people in their homes and markets or just walked. I always felt this was an important part of the project - the process of discovering the landscape, villages and people on foot. Although the number of cars is on the increase, horse and cart and walking are still the main forms of transport, particularly in this area.
Much of this project is a kind of 'street' photography relying on chance encounters - it was hard sometimes to just get up in the morning with no agenda and walk all day, sometimes from village to village along dirt roads, other times following cart tracks and footpaths used by local people through orchards and meadows. I would photograph the people I met on the way, people who interested me for some reason - peasant farmers working the fields, women walking along knitting in the street. Unintentionally, the fabrics and details of their clothing became as important in the photographs as the actual activity.
When I returned the following May, the Measurement of the Milk festivals were in full swing and the sheep were going up into the mountains for the summer, so I was able to meet shepherds and spend time at the sheepfolds as they milked the sheep and made cheese for the villages.
As I traveled from the more traditional north to the mountains in the centre of the country around Sibiu, I could already see changes in shepherding taking place. Instead of the flocks consisting of seven or eight sheep from each family, the shepherds in this area often owned most of the flock themselves, the villagers having gradually lost interest. Consequently, the Measurement of the Milk festivals were dying out in this area and often the shepherds said that it was only the pensioners who were interested in buying the cheese now.
Often the people I met were elderly and I shared many glasses of horinca (plum brandy) with women harvesting potatoes and shepherds wives. Using a few words of Romanian and French and a lot of sign language I managed to get by.
As a photographer, I have a particular interest in different landscapes and the way they are shaped by human activity. Intuition plays an important part in my working process, with my camera I'm drawn to observing and recording details which we usually let slip by unnoticed. Exploring people's relationship to the landscape, my work records a fragile way of life threatened by EU membership and forms a visual response to the issues raised by EU enlargement and its cultural consequences.
This project was supported by The European Cultural Foundation, Arts Council England, Impressions Gallery, Fujifilm and F.E. Wrightson and Associates and was exhibited and published as a monograph by Impressions Gallery, Bradford, UK in Autumn 2007.
