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Costina Stan
BELGIUM
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"I photograph not to document the world but to understand."
Costina Stan is a Romanian photographer based in Belgium and a graduate of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, whose practice unfolds as an intimate and intuitive exploration of the self. For her, photography is a tool to examine her own emotions, her states of mind, and her subconscious, rather than the outward-facing instrument the medium is so often assumed to be. She resists the documentary impulse of photography in favor of something far more interior, turning away from the medium's familiar role and toward a quieter, more private function. It is not primarily a device for capturing the world, but a means of navigating it inward, and this reorientation is the foundation on which the rest of her work rests. Everything that follows in her practice proceeds from this single decision to point the camera, in effect, back toward herself.
Your Orchids Are Always In Bloom | Black & White Photography
$850
16.5 x 23.4
This image is part of my latest series 'Extra', where I take self-portraits with the body as a screen. I project images from old movies on the body. The body becomes a surface of projection, but also a character in the scene, present but peripheral. In this particular image there is a surrealistic aspect to it in the way the body blends into the projection, but also in the high contrast, creating a dreamy atmosphere. I like the ambiguity and the sensuality of the image.
Self-portraiture sits at the heart of the practice, though the outside world enters her work regularly and on its own terms rather than being shut out. For Costina, the camera is less an instrument of capture than a tool of excavation, a means of reaching toward what lighter looking would miss. She photographs not to document but to understand, to give shape and surface to emotions and subconscious states that resist articulation in language alone. This is the central purpose that distinguishes her images from the documentary tradition she sets aside: where documentation seeks to fix and record, her work seeks to surface and comprehend, to make visible the feelings that words cannot fully hold. The photograph becomes a way of knowing something she could not otherwise reach.
Look Me In The Shadow | Black & White Photography
$850
16.5 x 23.4
From the series 'Extra'. In this image the body is not as visible, but its contour disrupts the scene, adding a third character.
"The camera is not capture for me; it is excavation."
Her process is non-analytical, and she follows intuition over intention with a discipline that shapes the entire body of work. She resists the urge to question why a particular image, gesture, or fragment of the world demands to be photographed, declining to interrogate the impulse that draws her toward a given subject. Instead she allows the work to arise and surface on its own terms, trusting that meaning will emerge in the act of looking rather than in the act of planning. This trust is itself a kind of method, a deliberate refusal to over-determine the image in advance, and it gives her photographs their unforced quality, the sense that they were allowed to happen rather than made to happen. Meaning, in her practice, is something that appears in the looking, not something decided beforehand.
Presence | Black & White Photography
$850
16.5 x 23.4
From the series 'Extra'. Hands are a recurring motif in my work, because hands are our connection to the world. We feel things, we touch people, we connect, we distance ourselves.
Costina frequently turns her lens outward as well, using the external world of objects, lights, and shadows as a mirror for inner states. These images function as extensions of her self-portrait practice rather than departures from it, governed by the same inward logic even when they appear to look outward. The outside world becomes a starting point, a trigger for memory, feeling, and states of being that are deeply embodied even when they appear, on the surface, to be about something else entirely. A configuration of light, a shadow, an ordinary object, each can serve as the entry point into an interior state that has little literal connection to what the image seems to show. In this way the boundary between her self-portraiture and her outward-facing images dissolves, since both ultimately return to the same interior ground.
From the series 'Extra'. In this image the body is the most present, because you see the face and the gaze is towards the viewer, whereas the others are facing away from the camera. This is one of my favorite images, because I find it both confronting and ambiguous.
Constellations | Black & White Photography
$850
16.5 x 23.4
"I am less interested in telling my own story than in making images that give others access to theirs, so they reflect rather than receive."
"I treat the body as landscape, as vessel, as container for everything it holds: identity, sensuality, love, loss, and the quiet persistence of grief. When I photograph a shoulder or a hand or the curve of the neck, I am reaching for something that is intimate and frail and at the same time entirely universal. There is no sentimentality in it, but there is emotional charge. I do not photograph to document the world. I photograph to understand, to give shape to emotions and subconscious states that resist being put into words. I follow intuition over intention, and I never question why a particular image or gesture demands to be made. I want my photographs to work as mirrors, to make a space where someone can sit with their own memories, their own unresolved feelings, their own sense of presence and absence, and the question of what traces a life leaves behind. I would rather a stranger find themselves in the work than learn anything about me."
And He's Slowly Bleeding To Death | Black & White Photography
$850
16.5 x 23.4
From the series 'Extra'. In this image I introduce text, as an added layer of meaning. And again there is the hand coming out of nowhere to disrupt the scene, with a tender gesture of comforting or hiding?
The body occupies a central and complex position in her work, treated as landscape, as vessel, and as container rather than as a straightforward subject. Her photographs approach the physical form with equal measures of tenderness and rigidity, closeness and distance, holding these opposing attitudes together without collapsing one into the other. Isolated body parts, a shoulder, a hand, the curve of the neck, are rendered with an intimacy that speaks to vulnerability and frailty while simultaneously evoking something universal. The fragment, in her hands, becomes a way of reaching past the individual toward something shared, so that a single shoulder or hand carries a resonance far larger than the particular body it belongs to. This double movement, intimate and universal at once, is among the defining characteristics of how she photographs the body.
Pupeteer | Black & White Photography
$850
16.5 x 23.4
From the series 'Extra'. Again there is the motif of the hands, with a giant hand pulling the strings. The scenes from the projections I selected intuitively, what spoke to me. I try in my work to be guided by my intuition and to let things flow.
Positioned at the threshold of the embodied and the disembodied, her images carry the full weight of what a body holds: identity, sensuality, love, loss, and the quiet persistence of grief. There is no sentimentality here, but there is emotional charge, and the distinction between the two matters greatly to the character of the work. The photographs hold genuine feeling without tipping into the easy or the saccharine, sustaining an emotional intensity that remains honest precisely because it refuses sentimentality. This is a difficult balance to maintain, and it accounts for much of the work's power, the way it can address grief and loss directly while never asking for an easy or uncomplicated response. The charge is real, but it is held with restraint.
From the series 'Extra'. In this one again I left the text as an added layer of meaning. Here the body acts as a container for the characters in the film, adding to the ambiguity and surrealism of the image.
Why Do You Look So Sad | Black & White Photography
$850
16.5 x 23.4
Her practice is not confessional in the conventional sense, and this distinction is essential to understanding what she is doing. While the work draws deeply from personal experience, Costina is less interested in telling her own story than in creating images that give others access to theirs. The viewer is invited not to receive but to reflect, not to be told something about her but to encounter something of themselves. This reframing turns what might appear most private into something quietly generous, since the personal material becomes a doorway rather than a destination. The intimacy of the work, in other words, is offered outward, made available to the viewer rather than withheld as the artist's alone.
"I follow intuition over intention and never question the impulse."
Her photographs function as mirrors, creating a visual and emotional space in which viewers are invited to sit with their own memories, their own unresolved feelings, and their own understanding of presence and absence. They hold open the question of what traces a life leaves behind, posing it without ever resolving it on the viewer's behalf. Rather than delivering a fixed conclusion, the work leaves room for each person to bring their own losses and recognitions into the frame, completing the image through their own reflection. This is what it means for the photographs to act as mirrors: they return to each viewer something of that viewer, and the meaning that emerges belongs as much to the one looking as to the one who made the work.
Roots | Black & White Photography
$850
16.5 x 23.4
From the series 'Extra'. In this image you have the hand from the image and the hand of the physical body, connected, blended, becoming one, the roots of all connections.
Costina has exhibited in Bucharest, Romania, in Florence and Venice, Italy, and in Los Angeles, USA, carrying her work across markedly different settings and audiences. Whether encountered in a gallery, a curated interior, or an intimate clinical space, her photographs ask something of the rooms they inhabit. They ask for quiet. They ask for attention. They do not surrender their presence to a hurried or distracted glance, and so they quietly reshape the atmosphere of wherever they are shown, requiring the space to meet them on their own terms rather than the reverse. There is a steadiness in this demand, a refusal to compete for notice, that travels with the work from one location to the next.
From the series 'Extra'. In this image, the body becomes one with the home, left behind.
Home | Black & White Photography
$850
16.5 x 23.4
Across these different settings, the work maintains a consistent quality that holds intact regardless of context. It rewards stillness, returning more to the viewer who is willing to remain with it, and it consistently opens more than it closes. This is perhaps the clearest summary of what Costina Stan pursues through photography: a practice of inward navigation that resists documentation, follows intuition, treats the body as landscape and vessel, and offers the viewer not a story to receive but a mirror in which to reflect. The work does not seek to close meaning down but to hold it open, and in that openness lies its quiet and lasting demand, the request that each viewer bring themselves fully to the act of looking.
Shadow Dance | Black & White Photography
$850
16.5 x 23.4
From the series 'Extra'. In this image, there is the theme of the hand again, but once again it becomes one with the body, as in a dance.
"A shoulder, a hand, the neck, holds something universal."
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