Amintire din Tlmpul Trecut
Remembrance of a Past Time

The magical consciousness at work in these pictures is, in its primary iteration, the withdrawal of external indices of time and place. If we try, we can perhaps deduce something about Communist-era Romania in the 1970s by way of fashion and style, the ways people dress and perhaps the public demeanor they carry. But this information sits to the side of a more primary dissociation: the dreamlike as it sits within the everyday, and objects of perception as they are distinguishable from states of perception. Salzmann’s photographs pull the recognizable and the nameable toward the uncertain and the amorphous—without fully depositing them there, leaving them in a condition of partial dissolution and loss. This condition is fertile ground for new meanings by means other than logic. I would go further and suggest another order of magical consciousness also: the sense of an inverse relation between perception and presence. The act of photographing the streetcar windows is tantamount to an intervention into their ongoing qualitative evolution—following the audacious thought that a photograph can present or make- present this evolution by extracting it from its own flow, ceasing it into aliveness.