As I Found It 2015–2025

Alex Gâlmeanu is one of the most prominent Romanian photographers working today, widely known for his series, People I Know and The Anastasia Project. A graduate of the National University of Arts in Bucharest, his photographs have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, and many other publications. He is the founder of the Museum of Photography, a platform for researching, collecting, and recontextualizing archival photography. As I Found It is a series of photographs that run along a “one-way street”: with no set beginning, no planned ending, no single theme to organize their view. It’s documentary photography in an eclectic key — a way of holding on to the everyday spectacle unfolding nearby, whenever the photographer is present enough to notice it. The logic of the studio — poses, agreement, perfect light — falls away in favour of first and last sights: weather, glare, shadow, chance, the rhythm of pedestrians, scenes that assemble themselves without permission. Its images are rather future-oriented, present yet already-archival: proof that this was here, once, like this, exactly.