TITLE: Bygone

In the summer of 2023 I started photographing the lives of a group of kids in a village in Moldova. The project is a documentation of the innocence of childhood, in which even playing in the rubble and ruins of what is left of the Soviet Union feels magical and irreplaceable.
In the process of taking those pictures I got to reconnect a lot with my inner child, which, in retrospect, makes the pictures feel like the child within me took them. It now feels like the project isn't only about these kids, as it explores universal themes, such as childhood, nostalgia, the inner child, the need to control time and the feeling of having lost one’s innocence in the process of growing up.
This picture, specifically, is a portrait of Evelina, one of the girls I got to meet. Her loving and lighthearted nature reminded me a lot about myself at her age. Documenting her felt like I had the power to stop time, to immortalise her the way she is, to stop her from ever changing and dimming her own light.
So I asked her to look out the window, because in that one unique and irreproducible moment the planet was angled in such a way that the sun would hit her face, making her the only one that is forever glowing in the abandoned house, full of shadows and broken glass.

AUTHOR: Paula Gavrilita (Moldova, Republic of)

Documentary photographer from the Republic of Moldova. Currently studying photography in Rotterdam, Netherlands.