Fashion Eye Bucharest - Paul Kooiker

As Paul Kooiker puts it, “It’s not about where you go, but rather how you see what’s around you.” For the award-winning Dutch photographer, the Romanian capital was like a blank canvas, an unfamiliar place that he could explore as a perfect stranger. What he found was a city in transition, still marked by its Soviet past but reinventing itself, making its way toward a more hopeful yet uncertain future. Kooiker conceived Fashion Eye Bucharest as “a visual diary that attempts to touch every corner of the city, not in a literal sense, but in mood and feeling.” Working solely with the camera of his iPhone, he captured a series of black and white images focusing on everything from small details to monumental buildings, interspersed with colour portraits of young people from Bucharest’s creative scene – the only identifiable human faces in his photobook. “There were so many unpredictable situations that having any kind of system just wasn’t possible,” Kooiker says. “That’s the beauty of photography for me – you never really know what you’ll get. There’s always this element of uncertainty, and that’s what makes it so interesting.” Each title in the series features an extensive selection of large-format photographs, together with biographical information and an interview with the photographer or a critical essay. After the Louis Vuitton City Guides and Travel Books, this third collection presents travel photography with a fashion perspective, as the chosen photographers all infuse their images of great cities, faraway places or dream destinations with their unique vision.