Mândrie si beton / Pride and concrete, Photo Album by Petrut Cãlinescu and Ioana Hodoiu. Bucharest: Igloo Media, 2013.
Mândrie si beton / Pride and concrete, Photo Album by Petrut Cãlinescu and Ioana Hodoiu. Bucharest: Igloo Media, 2013.

Summary/Abstract: Amongst the few books that document the often dramatic changes currently taking place in village communities in eastern and south-eastern Europe, this book is unique. The outcome of a collaboration between photographer Petruţ Călinescu and anthropologist Ioana Hodoiu, it offers a rare insight into the fastchanging realities of villages in Maramureş, repudiating the common notion of village communities here and elsewhere as rural backwaters that have missed the train of globalisation. Călinescu and Hodoiu have worked in the area since 2010, documenting village life and following the inhabitants abroad, especially to Paris, where the latter are employed as construction workers and domestic servants. Operating in tandem - Călinescu shooting photographs and Hodoiu doing the research and interviews - they have co-produced a book that offers a dispassionate insight into the destiny of certain rural communities that have been involved in labour migration to the EU. The book is excellent in that it has eye for visual detail, observing the money-fuelled changes in material culture for example, without casting facile value judgements over what is often in the view of outsiders a betrayal of tradition and travesty of good taste.

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