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Rozafa Shpuza

Albania

Biography

Born in Shkodër, Rozafa Shpuza is a distinguished Albanian photographer. She is the founder and director of Gallery “ODA”, established in 2019 in her family’s 150-year-old house in Shkodër — a creative space that has hosted over 100 Albanian and international artists.
Rozafa Shpuza is a recognized authority in the field of contemporary fine art photography in Albania and has participated in numerous national and international photography exhibitions.
Her artistic work intertwines poetry, photography, and Albanian cultural memory, with a particular focus on her hometown, Shkodër.

Project

Photography is a long-standing love of mine, which continues to inspire me and be an important part of my daily life. I have been dealing with photography for many years, sometimes more intensely and sometimes more calmly, and I can say without fear that photography has made my life beautiful. I bought my first camera in Denmark when I went to do a specialization course in 1994. The dynamics of that country, the architecture, the people, the different way of conceiving public spaces tempted me to fix all this on my incredibly modest camera. Since then I have not stopped. I photograph on the street because I feel that the characters I capture are real and convey the message of life without frames. Street photography is the most important part of my artistic creativity. I travel a lot because I feel like cities have a lot of surprises for my camera. The last album with street photos is the one I made in Shkodra during the isolation period of the Covid 19 pandemic. An empty city, scared characters in a hurry, closed windows and doors, all these sensations are already fixed in my album "The diary of an anxious season". I have participated in many activities dedicated to photography, in joint and personal exhibitions, at home and abroad, with the good desire to get to know photographer artists and to see where my photography stands compared to their photos. 3 years ago I opened an art gallery in Shkodra, at the old parents' house, with the good desire to promote art

Statement

Rozafa Shpuza is a poet and photographer, a peculiarity that creates a connection between the two arts. She writes poetry, but is also productive in the field of photography, mainly in the genre of urban and street photography. Her photos are mainly shot on the streets of her hometown, Shkodra. The subjects of her photography are urban moments of city scenes, captured in an abstract, often surreal, humorous and well-composed way. The second gallery of photos, perhaps the most important, are portraits of city residents, shot spontaneously in public spaces, while performing activities or meditating in their tranquility, captured unconsciously, creating a special emotional state. What do the characters of the city think, silent passers-by, photographed in isolation, in the middle of urban chaos? It seems as if each of them is closed in their own inner world, immersed in their own personal thoughts and concerns. In an individualistic society, where everyone thinks about themselves, Rozafa naturally seeks to penetrate the individual and their psychology. A third gallery of photographs, which I really like, is the series of self-portraits on city streets, shot on sidewalks, shop windows or cafes, captured in overlapping different planes, alluding to a complex and confusing world in which the artist and the individual live in the modern city. Rozafa’s photographs, although unique in the Albanian photographic scene, are nourished by a rich international tradition of street photograph

Festivals Collaborations

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