This book offers a new way of looking at the geographical spaces occupied by urban squares, proposing a different perspective on European urban squares. This might strike one as a bold statement, but it should first and foremost be taken literally. The photographs in this book, taken with a professional drone, show an aerial view of squares in a number of historical European cities. Famous squares in well-known cities across Europe, from Lisbon to Istanbul, are presented alongside lesser-known but no less interesting squares.
Drone photography offers a bird's eye view. This is one of the few instances where technical and artistic languages successfully overlap. The bird's eye view is, almost without exception, spectacular. This view reveals something we might have only intuited until now: a deeper structure, which points to a new perspective on squares in a figurative sense as well.
Cătălin D. Constantin is a book publisher and anthropologist. He teaches Anthropology at the Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest. His first PhD thesis, published in 2013, focused on everyday life in Romanian cities at the beginning of the 20th century. His second PhD, completed in 2014, a cultural and anthropological reading of urban squares of European cities, was awarded by the Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism. It was the first time that the University of Architecture in Bucharest gave a PhD with the maximum grade to a person who is not an architect by profession.
Cătălin has edited a number of literature collections and photography books dedicated to cultural heritage. For the books he edits, he often produces both text and graphics, considering the combination between these two components essential. Windows from Bucharest and their stories sold out in three weeks and reached 1st place in book sales in Romania.
He conducts anthropological field research in the Pindus Mountains of Greece, where he studies the communities of Vlachs, speakers of a neo-Latin idiom on the verge of extinction. For his research he received an honorary diploma from the Macedoromanian Cultural Association, on the occasion of the 140th anniversary of its founding.
He has received the medal of honor awarded by KulturForum Europa, a German Foundation founded by Vice-Chancellor Hans-Dietrich Genscher.
For over five years he has coordinated a series of weekly museum education conferences at the Suţu Palace in Bucharest, Bucharest City Museum.
He has also organized multiple photography exhibitions in Romania, Spain, Turkey, Bulgaria, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Poland, Greece, Ireland, Italy and Portugal.
