“Her Interrupted Body – Surrealist Stratigraphies
With the concept of the image as symptom in mind – as formulated by Georges Didi-Huberman – I find myself thinking that, sometimes, the image anticipates what the body is yet to experience. It sees ahead of us.
The body never appears as a complete form. Between what we live, what we see, and what we imagine, there is always a distance. In the images gathered in this album, the body fragments, fades, or multiplies, becoming a space where memory, vulnerability, and the imaginary converge.
In contemporary visual culture, the body is often presented as a coherent, harmonious, and perfectly controlled form. “Her Interrupted Body – Surrealist Stratigraphies” proposes a different way of looking at corporeality. In place of the ideal image, an unstable body emerges – one traversed by experiences, social pressures, and inner tensions.
The photographs are built through layering and visual interventions – double exposures, camera movement, blur, and digital manipulation – that transform the image into a stratified space. The notion of stratigraphy thus becomes a metaphor for the accumulation of traces, experiences, and images that shape identity.
Influenced by the experimental strategies of the avant-gardes and by the surrealist imaginary, the project uses fragmentation not merely as a visual technique, but as a way of interrogating the contemporary body. The body becomes an uncertain territory, situated between presence and disappearance, between the visible and the invisible.
In these images, photography does not function as a document of presence, but as a site of transformation. The body
appears as a form in becoming – an archive of experiences and tensions, in which identity is not stable but always
negotiated.
The viewer is invited to draw close to these fragments of corporeality and to ask a simple question: what does it mean
to see a body that never fully offers itself?” Raluca Lupașcu
HER INTERRUPTED BODY
ISBN 978-606-95990-3-7
Photos, text: Raluca Lupașcu
Text: Iulia Pană
Editors: Cristian Bassa, Ana-Cristina Irian
DTP: Andreea Costăchescu
Publishing house: Editura Omnia Photo, 2026
Printed at AZERO
First edition of 50 photobooks
Winner of ROMANIAN PHOTOBOOK AWARD 2026 – Photographic Project Section – WOMEN PHOTOGRAPHER
Size: 15cm x 21cm Softcover
70 pages (English/Romanian text)
Interior: Color digital print on DCM 115gsm
Cover: UV print Mimaki UJF-3042 Mark II on Olin Colours Black 320gsm
You can get the photobook and support the artist here: https://www.instagram.com/ralucalupascu/.