I left my parents’ home shortly after I turned 11 and never lived with them again. My parents were working at the time as telecommunications engineers on a satellite station built by the Japanese in the Carpathians, some 130 km away from the capital. By all standards my childhood was unique, defined by a setting of pristine mountain landscape, high tech, classical music, and access to information in a country intoxicated by communist ideology and propaganda.
Until school started. The months between September and April meant short, rainy, cold days; naked trees; grey skies; wet mud and slushy snow; cumbersome clothing that made me feel like Kenny in South Park without actually protecting my feet from the cold; obligatory episodes of purulent tonsillitis leading without exception to penicillin shots administered by a nurse who seemed more used to handling cattle; Monday piano lessons 50 km away from home with a cold, blue‑eyed piano teacher who radiated as much warmth as an arctic night; Sundays with a tight stomach because of the Monday piano lessons; and finally: no free time. Just school (“cemetery of my youth” – to quote a Romanian poet), homework, and piano playing. Solace came only in the evening, when I went to bed and devoured books, many of them ahead of my age.
After finishing primary school my parents enrolled me in a music college in a city 50 km away from home, whose music courses I had already followed for four years as an extern. I lived there with a very kind family. One year later, urged by my piano teacher and after an entrance exam, they sent me to one of the two music colleges in the Romanian capital, Bucharest. I was going to live with my grandparents for the next twelve years – they had a big apartment, enough space to accommodate a 1.80 m long piano, and neighbors who didn’t object to endless hours of practicing.
In the 1990s Bucharest was a bleak, sordid, grey city. The beauty of old architecture gave way to decay and neglect; the socialist architecture was an insult even to the lowest standards of aesthetics and comfort. The winters were harsh and dark, the summers hot and dusty. In my first winter there, one year after the 1989 revolution, the gas reserves of the city were depleted and the temperature in my grandparents’ apartment dropped to 7 degrees Celsius. For how long, I don’t remember; what I do remember is that the ebony keyboard of the piano felt icy no matter how long I played. I had dreaded autumn and winter ever since I had to go to school, but moving to Bucharest raised the ante considerably.
By contrast, the summers meant long, sunny, hot days that never seemed to end; cherries, strawberries, watermelons, and sweetcorn; alpine meadows full of flowers; phlox in my grandfather’s garden and dahlias in my grandmother’s; light clothing; delicious dishes cooked by my grandparents or my aunt, in whose houses in the countryside I used to spend most of the summer holidays; hot days at the seaside with my parents; no homework, no school, no schoolmates calling me names, no waking up in the dark, and – without the supervision of my parents – very little practicing. The summers meant freedom. My spirits started to rise in March when the snowdrops appeared, reached their highest in June, started to drop after mid‑August, sank heavily in September, and reached an abysmal level after Christmas, when there was nothing left to brighten the winter months until Easter. I remember asking my father twice at the start of a new school year to extend my holiday by a week by telling the school I was sick. He did it. School meant separation from my grandparents and later from my parents. And after coming to Germany to continue my studies, for many years there was nobody waiting for me at the airport. So ingrained was my dread of autumn and winter that I used to have nightmares in early spring, dreaming it was already late autumn and the days short again, while I wondered in despair: “But how is that possible?! Spring has just started and the days should actually be getting longer.” I was thirty when I last had these dreams.
I owe it entirely to photography that I got rid of that dread – that I started to see beauty in the contorted forms of frozen leaves, in the saturated October colors, in the delicate texture of naked trees, in the mysterious silence of fog, in the rain droplets crinkling the water surface, in the low grey sky, and in the muted, discreet beauty of a November morning.
In the last years I have learned to love bad weather just as much as beautiful weather. And if I look at my photographs, the majority of them were taken in the very cold, forbidding, hostile weather I feared so much as a child and young adult. Not only did photography teach me to appreciate those months of the year through which I would rather have hibernated as a child, but it made me actively seek the conditions associated with them. Today I go in winter to the Hebrides and my spirits are at their highest when the weather is at its worst, with wind blowing sand, hail, and sea spray into my face; I bivouac with my family in sub‑zero temperatures; I ascend to huts in heavy rain and on muddy paths with my son; I can hold out in rain until I’m soaked and the camera sends only error messages. Thinking as a photographer also made me think as a farmer: I am glad when it rains – that means the plants can thrive and the groundwater replenishes. Short days have a practical advantage too: I get decent hours of sleep. Conditions that I perceived as oppressive and depressive as a child now belong to my favorites, and that is only due to photography.
I still love summer for all the reasons I loved it as a child. But I’ve come to love autumn and winter just as deeply, for the very reasons I once dreaded them. And I doubt that would have ever happened if photography hadn’t taught me to engage with the landscape in ways I never imagined were possible.
