Ania Sto
Living the Dream, 2020
Living the Dream is a project that questions the decision of people who have left the countryside and moved to the big city.
When looking for inspiration I was reflecting on my own experiences as an immigrant who feels displaced. The project draws on the conversations with people who realised that their chosen new path had not always lived up to their expectations. I have conducted short interviews with mainly Romanian immigrants living in London to find out what they feel and what they feel they have lost during their experience of migration.
I used analogue and digital photography, shooting in the UK and Romania. As part of the project, I posted a Mamiya RZ67 to a colleague in Romania who photographed landscapes under my direction and sent the films back to London where I reused them to shoot portraits of people who immigrated to the UK creating a sequence of double exposures.