Walking Among Cultures

In Walking Among Cultures, Andreea Chitan moves quietly through the English countryside, not to map it, but to see what lies beneath the soil of belonging. The landscape, long romanticised in English tradition through poetry and the solitary act of walking, becomes a silent witness to new presences—bodies and identities once absent from its frame.

The portrait becomes the still moment in an unfolding journey. Chitan photographs individuals of diasporic heritage, their faces held within the natural contours of the rural English land. The images are unhurried. No one looks out to conquer or claim. They remain, instead, in a space of encounter—between history and presence, between migration and rootedness.

Walking in England has long been considered an act of cultural intimacy, even entitlement—a way of knowing the land through movement, of asserting one’s place within it, a way of being English and of claiming English identity. Yet for those marked by ‘other’ geographies, ‘other’ languages, by ‘otherness’, walking carries different weight. It becomes a quiet negotiation of visibility. A way to inhabit space that was never made in their image, but which they now shape simply by being.

Having herself experienced the duality of being both within and outside English culture, Chitan approaches the landscape and walking within not as a backdrop, but as a participant—one that both reflects and refracts cultural histories. The individuals she photographs carry with them lineages, memories, and geographies that stretch beyond the boundaries of the English fields and footpaths. And yet, here they are—walking, pausing, being—staking their claim not through conquest, but through care.

Walking Among Cultures unfolds as a quiet meditation on shared terrain—on the possibility of belonging not as inheritance, but as gesture. In the act of walking, and in being witnessed through the walk, these portraits carry a soft insistence: that the English landscape, so long inscribed with a singular story, is neither fixed nor closed. It remains open—capable of absorbing new presences, holding overlapping timelines, and echoing with more than one voice at once.