Instant people

PHOTOGRAPHY

Jun 13

Photographer Andreea Andrei reclaims analogue photography to keep our memories collected in a touchable and non-digital way. For Polaroid Project. Instant people, she contacts people via social media to photograph them with her Polaroid camera.

Photography & text Andreea Andrei

We are sucked in by social media, internet and smartphones. We forgot how a real analogue photography looks or smells like and how many emotions we can live, how many memories we can recall from a physical photograph, now we just poses huge stocks of digital memories, which may disappear in the blink of an eye. I want to bring back the instant analogue photography into the art scene. It’s always a good idea to go back where it all (almost) started.

I want to make people understand that we still need analogue photography, maybe now more than ever. Everyone can own a digital camera and take pictures. But the beauty of analogue photography is that it gets you closer to the material, the real and palpable, in the face of the illusionary pixels. We shouldn't fade in technology, we shouldn't lose our humanity, I think it's our duty to take care of that. I think analogue photography is a part of that

“It helped me personally to build up my confidence in talking with people outside my social circle.”

I took those photographs because I felt like I need to document those people in a beautiful way, and that was to use my two Polaroid Cameras and try to do some magic with them.

It’s more a personal project as well because I’m a very shy person and an introvert even though I choose to have a job that involves lots of people and basically strangers where you have to get to know them. So in a way it helped me personally to build up my confidence in talking with people outside my social circle and just to find out that at a level we can relate even though we never spoken in real life. I’ve chosen people from my social media account and just popped the question to them.

About Andreea

Andreea Andrei is a Romanian/British visual artist based in the UK since 2015. She studied film directing at the Film & TV School in Bucharest, Romania where she was also born in 1991. She started working in television for a couple of years until she left Bucharest for London.

Her work has been extensively exhibited and published both in the UK and internationally.

To see more of her work, visit her website or follow her on Instagram

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JC Verona

Instant people

Photographer Andreea Andrei reclaims analogue photography to keep our memories collected in a touchable and non-digital way. For Polaroid Project. Instant people, she contacts people via social media to photograph them with her Polaroid camera.

“It helped me personally to build up my confidence in talking with people outside my social circle.”

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