10/1

Bogdan Gîrbovan is a photographer who lives and works in Bucharest, Romania, a city where 70% of the apartment buildings are similar. For his project 10/1, Bogdan selected one apartment building and shot portraits of the 10 different lives in 10 identical apartments. Bogdan himself lived on the 10th floor of the apartment building for three years. It was built in 1966, and it’s just one of approximately 70,000 similar apartment buildings in his city. Bogdan took each photo from the same position in each of the single room apartments. This is he says, “in order to better show the mixture of several different life styles under the same roof.” So how did he come up with this idea? One day, while he was going to his apartment, the lady from the first floor asked for his help to fix a door in her flat. Although Bogdan knew that the rooms were all identical from top-to-bottom, he did not truly realize it until helping his neighbour. He managed to convince all his neighbours to take part in the project and he noticed the differences in their personalities and in their ideas of decorating the same room.