Joakim Kocjancic’s story is a quintessentially European one. Born in Milan to a Swedish mother and an Italian father, he grew up in a small city near what is now the Slovenian border, completed a master’s degree in photojournalism in London, and now lives in Stockholm.
Much of Kocjancic’s photographic career has been dedicated to exploring, documenting and trying to understand the wild, ever-changing continent that raised him. His long-running project ‘Europea’, which spanned the years 1999 to 2016, saw him using a unifying monochrome graphic language to document many different European cities and represent them as a single, sprawling, borderless metropolis. This ambitious work reflected Kocjancic’s explorations of his own identity as a European, a son both of many places and of one.
His latest workis titled ‘INFIORE’. Unlike the sprawling scope of ‘Europea’, this project focuses on a single European city: Bucharest in Romania. Over a period of years, Kocjancic has been documenting this city in his distinctive, analogue, monochromatic style, meeting its people as they navigate life in the concrete landscape. For Kocjancic, it was a personal journey as much as it was a photographic one.
Read Jon Stapley’s interview with Joakim Kocjancic in B+W 303