We spread our things out onto one of the poolside beds, and shed our outer layer of clothing, revealing our swimsuits, which had been hiding underneath. As we are both getting old, we applied plenty of sunscreen, before finally lounging down onto the terrycloth.

 

“I know your dad is also a photographer,” I said, rubbing in a blob of sunscreen on my shoulder. “Was he how you originally started taking photos?” 

 

“No actually,” she said. “My dad was a photographer, but I wasn’t really introduced to it at a young age by him. I was more messing around with photoshop and graphic design as a kid. In high school, I had a little digital point and shoot like everyone else did, but it wasn’t until I got to college when I really discovered photography. I grew up in LA, I went to USC, but I hadn’t explored all that much of the city. I saw photography as a way to get to know the city better and discover new things about it. I was like, ‘I’m not going anywhere anytime soon, and I’m bored by the city, but I also don’t know nearly enough about it.’”

 

“I’m so surprised!” I said. “I assumed your dad must have been your entry point!”

 

“I actually picked up my mom’s camera,” she explained. “It was an old kind of janky film camera and started shooting. Also, I grew up driving all over the city with my mom, and I had all these bits of memories of structures and freeways and intersections. Photography became a vehicle to revisit these places outside of a car. What came up again and again was a focus on overlooked details in the city.”

“That is certainly what I get out of your photographs.” I said. “A distant yet intimate relationship with a city.” 

 

“My relationship with Los Angeles is very love/hate,” she agreed. “I’m so lucky to have grown up in such a big city. So many people come to LA to realize their dreams. With that there are a lot of broken dreams. There’s a lot of transients. I’ve seen so many people come and go and I’m still there. LA will always be my home.”

 

“Why do you think the city speaks to you so much on an emotional level?” I asked. 

 

“LA is a lonely place,” she said, rolling onto her stomach and looking out at the pool. “On one hand, I like that, because I can explore the city in a meditative way without being bothered by other people. I’m a social person, but artistically I’m more interested in lines and empty spaces than portraiture and LA is the perfect place for that. If I lived here, I’d be a totally different type of photographer.” 

 

“Your composition is so methodical,” I said. “Just on a logistic level, in a city with more foot traffic, that would be kind of impossible. Every line is in its exact place. Here you’d have people walking through your shot constantly.” 

 

“That’s true,” she said, unsure. “But more than that, there are a lot of open spaces and room to step back. The quality of light is different, there’s more of it, the buildings aren’t as tall. What I’m interested in is the compositional layers that can be utilized by being able to step back from a subject.”

“There’s a mystery to your work that I don’t usually associate with LA,” I said. “A sense of something more ancient than the city’s milieu readily possesses.” 

 

“LA has all these layers of history that reveal themselves if you take the time to look,” she said in a very ‘you don’t know shit’ kind of way. “I’m interested in places that tourists wouldn’t go. The places I love don’t have anything spectacular to see– but they have stories to tell. It’s a relatively new city and it’s gone through more frequent changes than other cities. There’s not a lot of desire to preserve anything. The architecture hasn’t been treated preciously, and because of that, there’s a bit more evidence of the city's past iterations.”

 

I thought back to a monologue Sinziana recently wrote for The Great American Folk Show podcast. In it, she poignantly summed up this feeling of LA’s tactile recent history:

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It's been 14 years since I picked up a camera and made Los Angeles my complicated muse. LA can be defined by an amalgamation of unusual architecture - Strip Malls, Dingbats, Stilt Houses, Bungalows, Googie Style, Freeway interchanges, Micro-Architecture. Many might say the city has no cohesive architectural identity, due to its young age, its sprawling and constantly evolving nature, and perhaps a significant lack of historical preservation over the years. 

​

To me, Los Angeles is made of walls and surfaces that tell us stories, each layer of paint giving way to a clue of what might have been before. 

“I mentioned earlier that your composition is extremely dynamic,” I said. “If one color or angle was different, they wouldn’t really work. How did you train your eye to be able to capture these images in the wild?” 

 

“I worked to train my eye to create these specific images by limiting variables as much as possible,” she said. “For the most part, I only shoot on one camera, which is square format. I don't have to decide if a frame is going to be vertical or horizontal. I only shoot on one or two lenses. I’m so used to them that I see the world around me in those parameters all the time. I try to view photography as a purely visual medium, and I move away from narrative. I’m interested solely in shapes, color, shadow, geometry, and lines.”

“One of the most impressive things about you as an artist is your technical prowess,” I said. “Does that come naturally to you or is it a struggle?”

 

“I really am into technical stuff!” she said with confidence. “I love to be precise with everything. I actually didn’t go to school for photography, I went for film. At this point, I’ve done commercial photography and cinematography for film– those two things are diametrically opposed to my fine art work. In my work, I’m kind of breaking all of the rules that traditional photography is supposed to follow. 

 

“I didn’t set out to break rules, but because I learned on my own, I found my own aesthetic. I ended up with a formula that worked for me. When I tell people about the settings that I use, they are shocked. I want everything flat, no depth of field, so that it feels more like a painting. I shoot in broad daylight, the absolute wrong time of day; but it works for me. When I get too invested in the technical aspect of things, I can lose sight of the creative. If I had gone to school for photography, I wouldn’t be producing the work I am now. People will say, ‘You aren’t using the golden ratio… but I kind of like it? I don’t understand.’ I’m like, ‘That’s just how I’m shooting it.’”

 

“Those light conditions and settings are extremely conducive to LA,” I said. “Your shooting style and technique are, well, at least originally were, totally adapted to a specific environment. That is probably where some of the tension comes from, conditions that are both oppressive and pleasant.” 

 

“Exactly,” she said. 

 

“The ennui of heaven,” I said, very proud of myself for putting that string of words together off-the-cuff. 

 

“I’m hungry,” she said, yawning, before pulling out her phone and ordering us food from the QR code sign attached to our bed’s canopy. 

“There’s a heavy focus on architecture in your work,” I said. “I wonder if growing up between California and Romania, and that contrast, lends itself to this fascination.” 

 

“It’s interesting, obviously they are super different places, but there are a lot of architectural similarities,” she said. “Where I grew up in LA there were all these condos on a hill that were all built at once in the 70s. It was so isolating. When I’d go to Romania in the summer, there were kids to play with, and it felt like a more traditional suburban experience. Both places have a uniform dystopian quality. I think growing up, I was both fascinated and disturbed by the structures in both places.”

 

“That’s funny, that opposing architectural philosophies, ultimate socialism and ultimate capitalism, both stumbled onto a similar aesthetic,” I said.

 

“When you go to Lancaster or Palmdale, those beige boxes with manicured lawns on the freeway are the capitalist dream, but they are also straight out of socialist architecture,” she continued. “I’m really interested in the rise and fall of the American dream; the complexities of it, the hypocrisies of it. So many people came out west to pursue something. So many of those people abandoned their dreams. We see remnants of that all over the American Southwest.”