Alexandra Corcode 2023 Tom Stoddart Award For Excellence
Susana Pușcaș, born in 1927, and Victor Pușcaș, born in 1925, live in Victor's parental home in a small village in Bistrița-Năsăud county, Romania. In the evenings, Victor, who is blind, waits for Susana to make his bed and change his clothes while listening to the TV on high volume.
Susana prays before going to sleep while Victor waits for her to finish her ritual. Susana was a housewife all her life, taking care of her daughter and husband, the garden, and the animals. In her spare time, she made blankets that she would later sell, earning a good amount of money. Victor worked as a blacksmith and a farmer, but since he was a refugee in Hungary, he also received money supplements from the government. Owning two apartments in the city, they would often rent them out, providing another source of income. Considered wealthy because their pension was higher than the average, they kept their money in the house, making them vulnerable to numerous robbery attacks and threats with knives.
Susana and Victor sit on the bench in front of their house after Susana cleaned the front yard of leaves, making a fire. Usually, in the afternoons, they spend a few hours on the bench watching people and socializing with their neighbors.
The yard of Susana and Victor's house. They keep a few chickens and a dog to protect the house from thieves. During the winter, Susana wakes up before Victor to make paths in the snow and to start the fire. They use a wood stove to heat the room they live in, which is also used for cooking food.
Victor sits patiently in the kitchen while Susana talks to him from the patio. He is used to sitting for long periods of time, waiting to feel Susana’s presence. He would often ask in the middle of the day, "Is it midnight?".
Susana has her wounds dressed by her niece, Camelia. She was sexually assaulted in an attempted robbery on the 30th of July 2019 in her own yard while Victor was ten meters away, waiting for her in the house. The criminal, in his thirties, had recently been released from prison after killing five people.
A month after the assault, Susana is washing herself in a basin in the kitchen of her house. Not having running water, she has to heat the water that she brings from the fountain in the yard.
Alexandru, their niece's husband, helps Susana get up from the bed to drink water. Susana’s pain from the broken ribs after the assault forced her to stay in bed for weeks.
Susana is burning waste and preparing the yard for Victor’s burial. Victor died on the 8th of October 2019, suffering from liver cirrhosis caused by nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, three months after Susana’s sexual assault. In Romania, the deceased family member is kept in the guest room of the house for three days, but Susana wanted to bury Victor on the sixth day after his death because Wednesdays and Fridays are fasting days in the Orthodox religion, and she wanted to serve food with meat for the guests.
Camelia and Susana are discussing above Victor’s coffin while two neighbors are untying the knots of Victor’s tie, belt, and laces before the funeral ceremony. It is a Romanian superstition - untying the knots represents that the widow can continue their life, and covering the mirror in the left corner ensures the dead won’t see themselves in the mirror and come back. The portrait of their deceased daughter, Măricica, hangs in the center of the photograph.
Victor’s burial in the Sângeorzul Nou cemetery. The priest is reading the sermon while the neighbors and nephews are helping to position Victor in the grave where his daughter and son-in-law are also buried.
Susana sits at the grave of her husband Victor, her daughter Măricica, and her son-in-law Zaharie. On the gravestone are written their birth and death dates; it is a common practice for Romanians to inscribe their birth date long before their death. Victor and Susana had twins, but the boy died a few days after birth. The daughter, Măricica (born 1948), survived and lived happily with her parents and husband until 1993 when one night she fell sick and went to the hospital. There, the doctors gave her an injection, and she never woke up again. The cause of her death remained a mystery for everyone. No further investigations were conducted after her death. Susana believed in spells cast by a neighbor because she found threads under Măricica’s bedsheets. Susana herself practiced spells, and in Romanian tradition, if a person is not guilty of something, the spell turns back to the caster. Two years after Măricica's sudden death, her husband was found dead in the bathtub of their apartment.
Intervals of Warm Absence
Victor, 95, and Susana, 96, have been married for over seventy years, living alone in the small village of Sângeorzul Nou in northern Romania. After the death of their only child in 1993, and those of family and friends, they rely on each other totally. Victor had been blind for several years, but after Susana was sexually assaulted in an attempted robbery in 2019, the couple became even more reliant on one another.
Alone in a ghost village, their humble lifestyle became unbearably harsh. Liver cirrhosis put Victor in the hospital two months after Susana’s ordeal, and his death from the disease on October 8th 2019 has filled Susana’s remaining days with apprehension. This story is about the love and support that defined their relationship in the midst of the difficulties they faced being left behind.
Their story isn’t unusual, for many of the four million people who fled Romania amid the 1989 revolution, there were elderly relatives and children who were left behind. Without the presence of the younger kin, those who remained after the revolution were left doubly vulnerable to the precarity of life in impoverished rural areas - scant access to running water, phone lines, gainful employment, and a rise in violent crime. 34 years after the revolution, the economical situation in the country still forces people to leave.
I have dedicated over five years to working on the story of Susana and Victor. In the meantime, I also relocated to Western Europe forf better opportunities. This experience has granted me the ability to perceive both dimensions of the abandonment phenomenon occurring in Romania, along with its impact on the community and future generations.
As my portfolio shows, I have created an intimate work that shows the feeling being abandoned from the elderly perspective. During the project I realised that it is not only the old that are left behind, it’s the young too. Teenagers are left without their parents, and struggling to grow up in the rural areas, often forced to mature too soon with little positive prospects. To tell this story, I want to focus on my cousin Monica, and visualise her daily life. Through her and her story, I am going to explore the phenomenon of abandonment of a young generation.
About the Photographer
Alexandra Corcode (b.2000), is a Romanian visual storyteller based between The Netherlands and Romania. She is currently undertaking a BA in Photography at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague (KABK) and she studied Photojournalism at the Danish School of Media in Aarhus, Denmark. Her work focuses on themes of immigration, loneliness, death, lost traditions, mental and physical deterioration, and the traces of human absence. Much of her practice is focused on capturing the unseen communities in her country. She continues to document the life of her family and low-income communities, in her home country of Romania.
This year she was shortlisted for Kassel Photobook Dummy Award with her book "Your Death is In My Hands". In 2022, she has been selected as "Emerging talent in photojournalism" by The Guardian, has won Canon Student Development Programme and has been selected to participate in the 35th edition of Eddie Adams Workshop in New York. She has been published in Reuve 6 Mois - La Revue de Photojournalisme and has been selected for the New York Times Portfolio Review. In 2019 she was a finalist for the Siena International Photo Award.