Maria-Teodora Tăbăcaru
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Nov 11
- 6 min read
Maria-Teodora Tăbăcaru is a photographer based in Romania. She works with both color and black-and-white, choosing the tone depending on the story she wants to tell. Much of her work comes from noticing those moments that are easy to miss. She often returns to subjects over long periods of time, giving the work space to develop slowly. In series like “Submerged,” she uses water and reflection to explore themes of presence, memory, and identity.
Q: Your images move between fine art and documentary. How do you know where a story belongs?
A: For me, the line between fine art and documentary is fluid. If you think about it deeply, every project has the potential to become documentary, or autoethnographic, for that matter, because it is always the person behind the lens who decides what others will see. Art passes through a personal, human lens before reaching the viewer, making the artist part of the art itself.
I approach my work with this same mindset. Through the art we create, we come to understand ourselves more deeply, our passions, interests, memories, and even our traumas.
Art becomes a way to process and redefine what shapes us. A story begins for me when something sparks inside, when a subject challenges me, provokes emotion, or invites me to look beyond surface aesthetics. Often, I recognize a story emerging when I notice patterns: I keep photographing the same subjects, themes, or concepts. That’s when I start asking myself these questions: “Why do I keep insisting with this? What does this mean to me? How does it make me feel?”
If I don’t have the answers, I give the subject space to breathe, take shape, and evolve. I let it occupy my thoughts, allowing it to grow naturally. Interestingly, my most meaningful projects are always the ones I can’t stop thinking about, the ones that live in my mind long before they take shape through my camera’s lens.
Q: You often work with both colour and black-and-white. What decides the tone for you?
A: At the beginning of every project, I set certain visual and conceptual guidelines for myself, almost like rules. These help me maintain a consistent narrative and ensure that the work flows naturally. Without them, it’s easy to drift and lose the core of the story. When I start a new project, I always look at the world I’m photographing in both colour and black-and-white.
Even though I set these initial rules, I stay open to how the project evolves. Often, one approach feels more appropriate from the very beginning, as it simply aligns with the story I want to tell.
For documentary and autoethnographic work, I’m instinctively drawn to black-and-white. There’s something about its simplicity and timelessness that allows sensitivity and texture to surface more strikingly, allowing the viewer to focus on the bigger picture.
For me, light and shadow act as storytellers, as they can both conceal and reveal, holding mystery while only hinting at the subject’s identity. Colour, on the other hand, invites immediacy and powerful emotions.
It allows me to work with intensity and sensation, creating images that echo the vibrancy and pulse of lived experience.
People often find it puzzling that I’m so attracted to black-and-white, and use it so much in my practice, especially since I’m a very colourful person. Both my fashion sense and my personality gravitate toward vivid tones. But perhaps that’s why black-and-white feels so compelling to me. It strips away the distraction of colour and lets me focus on essence and the objective truth I see in front of my eyes.
While colour, on the other hand, allows me to express myself and my emotions so openly, translating what I feel internally into something tangible, alive, and full of presence.
Q: In “Submerged”, emotion feels almost physical. What pushed you to start that project?
A: “Submerged” began quite intuitively. Over the course of a year, I took three self-portraits on separate occasions. Two of them depicted me fully immersed, or appearing to be immersed, in water, while in the third I was seen through water-like textures. After creating the third portrait, I quickly realized there was something deeper to explore. Beyond the technical challenge of understanding how light behaves in and through water, how it bends, reflects, and transforms, I discovered that being submerged in water is where I feel most at peace. It’s the space I return to when I need clarity, when I’m searching for solutions, or when I simply want to feel grounded. It’s where my ideas begin to take shape.
I’ve also never been drawn to reflections in the usual sense, like the kind we find on city streets, but rather to those that hold mystery, distort, reshape, and leave us wondering. I’m fascinated by reflections that appear where we least expect them, especially in water.
This process led me to question identity and perception, and I found the gap between how I see myself and how others see themselves. I realized I wanted to explore this further, to create a dialogue not just with myself, but with the people around me.
“Submerged” naturally evolved into a collaborative project, a conversation between my perspective and the ways I perceive the art and presence of others. Although the project operates within the framework of fine art, at its core it remains documentary, a study of identity, perception, and the human need to be seen.
Q: You speak about presence and absence. What do those ideas mean to you when you photograph people?
A: For me, photography is a way of translating emotion, memory, and thoughts into visual form. I’m drawn to the liminal spaces of both human presence and absence. These are the moments that take shape due to our perception of a gesture, a shadow, or a trace, which can sometimes hold as much meaning as the subject itself.
When I photograph people, I’m often as interested in what is there as in what isn’t. Presence can be physical, as seen through the body, the gaze, the interaction with light, but the absence of a human body carries its own kind of weight. It speaks of memory, distance, and longing of what remains unseen, yet deeply sensed.
Through this tension, I try to capture the fragility of being, how humans exist both in the moment and outside of it, constantly shifting between visibility and disappearance. In many ways, it’s within this delicate balance that I find the most truth about identity and human experience.
Q: Anthropology is part of your background. How does that way of seeing show up in your work now?
A: Anthropology has taught me to observe closely, to pay attention to human behaviours, patterns, and the subtle ways people interact with their environments. It trained me to ask questions, not just about what I am seeing, but why it exists, how it shapes identity, and what it tells us about different cultures and experiences.
That perspective continues to guide my work today. Whether I’m photographing myself, others, or the world around me, I approach each subject with curiosity and empathy, as though I am learning from it rather than just documenting it. I notice patterns, recurring gestures, and environments, and I explore how these shape perception and identity.
In projects like “Submerged,” for example, anthropology guides me to consider not only my own experience but the shared human need for refuge. Even in more experimental or fine art contexts, I carry this lens of careful observation. It allows me to navigate the space between documentary and artistic interpretation, capturing both the external and internal landscapes of my subjects.
Q: What kind of moment makes you stop and take a picture?
A: In the beginning, like most photographers, I was very drawn to street photography, to its spontaneity and rhythm.
But over time, my relationship with it has changed. I’ve learned that photography is not only about reacting to the world around me, but about observing it patiently, allowing it to unfold.
Now, I rarely stop impulsively to take a picture. Instead, I notice the composition first, the balance of light, the textures, and the unfolding space, and then I wait for the right element, the right subject, to enter the frame and give meaning to that composition.
It’s in that moment of anticipation, between seeing and capturing, that I find the magic of photography. It’s less about the instant itself and more about recognizing when everything quietly aligns, when emotions and time itself converge into a single frame.
