Aga Łuczakowska's €30 Photo Book Reads Bucharest Against the Grain

Aga Łuczakowska's self-published book Râsu'-plânsu', priced at €30, distills a decade of photographing Bucharest into 60 pages of black-and-white images that read the city against the grain of Nicolae Ceaușescu's imposed urban order.

The title carries the argument. Râsu'-plânsu' is a Romanian phrase meaning "laughing through tears" — the capacity to find tenderness, irony and resilience inside hardship. In Łuczakowska's softback, the phrase works less as historical explanation than as an invitation: a short, immersive lesson in a different way of reading place, memory and the traces people leave behind.

How the book was built

Łuczakowska didn't set out to document Ceaușescu's dictatorial programme of forced relocation and urbanisation in full. Instead, over roughly ten years living in Bucharest, she photographed fragments of the city on her way to work and on weekends. The rhythm of everyday life, not an archive, did the editing.

Her black-and-white images look past the imposing concrete of the dictatorship's housing estates to find older memories still alive in the built environment. A cheap floral blanket on a washing line becomes a quietly profound image: the chintzy pattern carries echoes of folk tradition and a rural imagination set against the stark geometry of brutalist modernism (the austere concrete architecture of postwar state planning).

Elsewhere, repeated fragments of domestic bric-a-brac appear — boxes, broken metalwork, objects that feel both lost and preserved, brittle yet enduring. She photographs not simply what is present, but evidence of adaptation within an imposed architectural order.

What does the book change for its viewer?

It changes pace and attention. As the review puts it: Râsu'-plânsu' "asks the viewer to slow down and look differently. Its power comes not from scale or completeness, but from the intimacy of its observations" — observations that show how memory, identity and human resilience persist within spaces designed to transform them.

An anti-authoritarian twist on authorship

The sharpest conceptual move sits outside the book itself. Łuczakowska has invited other artists to adapt her publication — adding drawings or pages, or cutting into existing images. She calls the ongoing project Râsu'-plânsu' Interventions, and it embraces a decentralisation of power, an anti-authoritarianism, that extends even to her own work.

The gesture mirrors the book's subject: a project about life persisting under an imposed order becomes a project that refuses imposed order in its own making. With Interventions ongoing, the work is set to keep growing beyond a single author's hand.

Râsu'-plânsu' by Aga Łuczakowska is self-published, priced €30; details at agaluczakowska.com.

By Grace Kim