Alex Manea 

TEXT:

 

     The year is 2022. For years, during the Christmas season, I had followed a ritual at my wife’s request, taking her and our children to a studio for posed family photographs intended to “create cherished memories.” That year, however, the gesture carried deeper significance. My relationship with my wife had deteriorated to the point where separation was being considered, and the usual traditions felt hollow against the reality of our distance.

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     Amid this tension, and driven by my growing engagement with photography as both medium and method, I proposed an alternative. Rather than visiting a studio, I would personally document the holiday season, capturing moments through my own lens. This approach allowed me to create a set of memories that were both curated and intimate, reflecting the lived experience with attention, care, and personal interpretation. The resulting series emerged from this decision, a visual narrative born of both circumstance and intention. Remarkably, this intervention had its own resonance, fostering a temporary renewal within our family dynamics and a fragile sense of harmony.

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     The narrative above, however, represents only a partial truth. In reality, years of companionship and seven years of marriage culminated in separation. The event precipitated a period of psychological struggle, during which I engaged in therapy and explored methods of reconciling experience with perception. One exercise proved particularly transformative: by reimagining this period with a more favorable outcome, I could inhabit an alternate reality, experiencing the emotional resolution denied by actual events.

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     This practice drew on my longstanding interest in the concept of multiple universes, where parallel realities unfold simultaneously, each following its own trajectory yet interconnected through a fundamental predestination. Through photography, I constructed a mental multiverse in which I successfully navigated the challenges of that season and preserved familial bonds. The series became an enactment of this imagined reality, a means of exploring memory, desire, and the contingencies of existence. Each image functions as a portal into one of these potential worlds, blending fiction and lived experience, presence and projection.

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     Rewriting Christmas is not a documentation of events as they occurred, but a meditation on memory, imagination, and the capacity to inhabit multiple emotional landscapes at once. It examines the interplay between trauma, hope, and the narratives we construct to understand our lives, offering a space where personal history can be both preserved and transformed. The series lingers in the tension between reality and possibility, exploring the ways in which experience can be revisited, reconstructed, and reimagined without diminishing its complexity.