Miorița (Mioritza)

Salzmann spent a year with these shepherds, photographing them both at home in Poinana Sibilui, and on their walking journeys all across Romania, from Banat to Dobruja to Maramureș. On some primary level, Salzmann seems to have been motivated by the pastoral as an aesthetic experience—an urge I find even in his juvenilia, for example a 1966 photograph from rural France showing peasants on a country path between orchards and a stone cottage, in colors that recall the autochromes of the early twentieth century, and the gauzy rigor of the post-Impressionist paintings that Salzmann encountered in childhood visits to the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia. And pastoralism as an aesthetic has remained present across the decades of Salzmann’s career: there is a clear arc linking his early photograph in France to, for example, his late works in Peru.