"The need to bring things spatially and humanly closer has come to be an obsession of our times, just as a trend to deny all that is unique and ephemeral in a given event by reproducing it photographically", asserted Walter Benjamin, back in the thirties. Such is perhaps Vlad Nanca's obsession who, with the help of his camera gathers things of everyday life without touching or displacing them, but respecting their essence. A public bench can therefore be transformed into an undefined horizon where colours fuse one with another as if to intimate the moving aspect of the expectation. Watering-hoses seem to move about like reptiles lost in the midst of a flora reduced to its simplest expression: the sward. A receptacle as trivial as a dust-bin, is it not being metamorphosed into a vase filled with graffiti whose stems are just virtual? This Romanian artist wishes to guide us towards tracks where the earth, the soil, a solid element remains very present, nay, even omnipresent. His sharp vision and his unusual keenness of observation define him a "hunter" ˆ not of pictures, but of the constituent elements of the world that encompasses us and to which we hardly pay any attention any more. Drawing our eyes to the most elementary things ˆ an animal's foot-print, the trace of a plant, those "everyday pictures" thus question us regarding the anchorage of the humane in its natural environment. Leaving the best part to the earth under the sky, man himself is absent. Would this imply that it is better to deny the unique and the ephemary rather than immortalize this earth which effectively "is" at a certain moment in a definite place? Giving testimony to the inertia and weight of organic matter, these images evidently open the way to reflection on the nature of these substances. Living or dead, they nevertheless possess the common characteristic of resting on the soil, equally as we do. Nanca's eye, often directed downward, then just re-writes this aspiration conscious or not, of every human being, to return to the origins, some sort of an introspection to his own roots. The power of these images undoubtedly resides in the pertinence with which they give an account of earthly realities and bid us "lift up our eyes to the soil". An uprooted artist, or one rooted in his original culture, Vlad Nanca nonetheless offers us his own visions of space, providing food for reflection. Every day is a source of new experiences that, with him, become translated through photography. This medium consequently appears as an indispensable tool for responding to his avidity to create and discover life. As a matter of fact, he thinks that everything that conditions our existence, all that surrounds us, "awaits its hour to be seen, shown, photographed". With this principle in mind, how not to detect in him that thirst for knowledge and understanding of a world which he, disinherited, had known during the communist régime in Romania? How to fail to understand that longing to testify to the details of existence when they had for so long been perceived through a window? The objective form of a contemplating conscience, the framework, all that delimits latent photography being born under the discerning eye of the artist, is as important as its contents. Within the proper limits, is not Nanca's work resumed in its enclosure within four pointed angles of a living image that allows itself to be taken, that gives itself up behind the lens? Is not the link uniting the photographer to his subject ˆ the keystone of that building ˆ at least subjective? NADINE COQUE