Alex Manea 

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     In Instant Universe, I set out to photograph the unphotographable. Using an Instax SQ6 camera, I transform the immediate, limited format of instant photography into a tool for imagining celestial phenomena. Ordinary lights, reflections, and objects in the spaces around me become stars, planets, eclipses, and constellations. A lamp can suggest a sun, a glint of glass traces an orbit, and the blur of a passing light evokes the glow of distant galaxies. Each image functions simultaneously as a spontaneous observation and as a field note from a universe that cannot exist outside perception.

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     What draws me to this project is the tension between impossibility and capture. Instant photography is immediate, finite, and technically constrained; celestial bodies are vast, remote, and untouchable. By placing one within the other, I explore the way imagination and observation intersect. Each photograph becomes a document of both an actual encounter and an invented cosmos, a record of a moment in which the ordinary expands into the infinite.

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     The series is guided by a deliberate paradox: the medium cannot fully contain the subject, yet the attempt itself generates meaning. A small, mundane light can evoke the vastness of space, and the ordinary surfaces of daily life can give rise to the suggestion of entire solar systems. Through repetition and experimentation, I construct a constellation of images that function as a visual archive of imagined astronomy, where impossibility becomes a method rather than a limitation.

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     Instant Universe also investigates perception itself. It asks how the act of looking shapes what we call reality, and how attention can generate worlds where none exist. Photography in this context is both documentation and fiction, a negotiation between what is real and what is imagined. The works record not only light, but my own responses to it, the impulse to seek the extraordinary in the everyday, and the pleasure of invention under constraint.

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     Ultimately, the series traces a fragile boundary where perception and imagination intersect. It does not resolve the tension between scale, distance, and observation, nor does it attempt to represent the cosmos literally. Instead, it dwells in fleeting instants of wonder, produced by the encounter of limitation and possibility. These photographs are small traces of expansive thought, tiny portals into universes that exist only through attention, gesture, and the imaginative act of seeing.