How do you immortalize your trips and travels? Take lots of photographs of places you visit and preserve them in an album or on your laptop, that’s how. Well, Ana Stretcu goes one further, she first makes them memorable by superimposing the photo with the cutouts of her and her boyfriend, instead of posing in them!
Stretcu does the cutouts with ease since she’s an excellent illustrator and loves drawing and doodling. Her unique take on travel photographs has led to a series called ‘I Was Cutout for This’ that encompass all her travels.
Whenever Stretcu goes out on a trip with her boyfriend, she takes the snaps of all the sightseeing places without any of them figuring in them. She then draws cartoonish characters of herself and her boyfriend, proportionate to the setting in the photograph, and cuts them out.
Depending upon the scene in the photograph, Stretcu places these cutouts at appropriate places showing them do various fun things that she’d have actually done there with her boyfriend. The end result is a delightful picture that’s etched in the memory forever. This has become her way of remembering all her travels that otherwise would’ve ended up forgotten in a folder on her laptop.
It all started when Stretcu decided to go on a three-week trip with her boyfriend and wanted to record her experiences by taking photographs. However, collecting travel photographs the usual way seemed so passé, so she decided to create a visual record that’d remain unforgettable. This is what led her to introduce cutouts in her photographs, showing all the fun and adventure they’d experienced together.
Although Stretcu felt that this quirky idea would come to an end in a trip or two, she was smitten by it and simply kept going. And this is what initiated her said travel series, where she uses cutouts in photos even of places closer to home. The twist the cutouts give to these pics is what makes them so memorable.
Stretcu’s oh-so-cute pics are making waves on the internet. On Instagram alone, she has a fan following of about 158,000 and counting.
Ana Stretcu: Website | Instagram