Elska, Issue 52 – Chisinau (Moldova)

Elska is a bi-monthly male photography and culture art-zine on 130 pages of beautifully stroke-able matte paper. Each issue is shot in a different city with men from that city, including not only their photographs but their stories too. It’s a sort of cross between a quasi-intellectual queer pin-up and a sort of sexy anthropology journal.

In this issue:

This fifty-second book in the Elska series takes us to the capital of Europe’s least visited country, Moldova. Such a claim to fame is the ideal bait for us, sparking our intense curiosity and hoping we can persuade our readers to explore along with us.

Chisinau turned out to be a super lovely town, one that really should attract more tourists. There’s the elegant city centre, full of stately architecture and a vibrant restaurant scene, and just outside it, there’s a wealth of brutalist buildings to marvel at. Culturally, there are two main sides of Moldovan life: a Romanian one (the country was part of Romania before 1940) and a Russian one (owing to large migration of Russians following Moldova’s annexation into the Soviet Union after 1940). These two sides appear friendly to each other but not exactly harmonious — if there is one recurring theme that showed up during our conversations with our Chisinau elskans, it’s how these sectors remain separate, cleaving the already marginalised LGBTQ+ community even further by internal divisions.

Inside Elska Chisinau, writer and photographer Liam Campbell introduces the city through encounters with several of its local gay men. There are two key components to the Elska experience: photography and story. For the photographic portion, Liam shares honest and intimate images, including the men he met here. They were photographed in their city streets, dressed in their own style, and also photographed at home, not dressed at all. For the story portion, Liam shares a narrative derived from extensive diaries kept during his visit to Chisinau. This includes details of moments shared with these men, conversations they had, and a little bit of daydreaming inspired by them.

‘Elska Chisinau’ features nine chapters, dedicated to the following local elskans: Alex K, Dumitru S, Artiom C, Vasile M, Denis B, and Nicolae I.