While Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment still preserves its status among photography theoreticians intact, the attention of documentary photography is gradually shifting towards the effects of facts on time and memory. In a visual culture bombarded by mass media reportage, still images are no longer events but rather the remains of the historical torments that once took place. They become, in the words of Stephen Bull, traces of the traces, the carriers of what is left of the aura of the photographed object.

In a dialogue with their own nature, photographs bridge the dichotomies between the past and the present, the still and the moving image. They break Bresson’s decisive moment in a million befores and afters, restoring what Hollis Frampton once described as the infinite virgin filmic space that pre-existed the inception of still photography. This eternal back and forth in time and vice versa, this condensation of myriad moments and spaces in one single picture, this constant action of writing memory by means of infinite narratives, marks the transition from site and time-specific pictures towards pictures which invite us to think photography. As such, documentary photographs today work as suggestive recollections of impressions and feelings, encouraging a metaphorical and symbolical reading. It is up to the viewer to imagine and finally interpret the reality behind them.

The presence of the photographic as a raising concern in late documentary is encapsulated neatly in the practice of the Romanian photographer Dana Popa. Popa’s work has been exploring since 2006 cases of human sex trafficking in Moldova, one of Eastern Europe’s poorest countries. In a subversive play with spaces and memory, it bears witness to the devastating psychological sequels of this cruel phenomenon for thousands of young women and girls caught up in prostitution, and for their families.

Not Natasha (2006), the first photographic circle of the project, featured portraits of former sex slaves in Moldova. Following on from this, more recent research has given birth to The Missing, a more abstract, yet intuitive and metaphorical work of presences and absences, in which Popa captures the traces of hundreds of missing women by going back to both their homes and the rooms they crossed during their hours of labour.

A cup left on the table since the day she went to school, the bed made since the morning she went away for two months, old family photos and dried flowers… She could finally have a passport in her hands; she could hang on to the hope of a better life in a foreign country; she had to take the risk. But she never returned.

Popa retreated with her camera into the world of remote Moldovan villages, encountering locked doors and empty rooms. Though abandoned for years, paradoxically these spaces remain warm and familiar. One can still feel the presence of those who are no longer there. In silence, old mothers and children face years of absence but still keep the hope alive.

Meanwhile, far away, behind the fancy facades of the cosmopolitan capitals of Europe, hundreds of rooms become exile spaces for myriads of bodies objectified for male fantasy. While most of them are squalid and cold, many others appear familiar and warm. Mirrors, red lights, posters, the list of services on the bedside — all these little attempts at humanizing these rooms, at imbuing them with a kind of homeliness, speak for these girls’ need to survive.

In their open-ended muteness, the pictures of Dana Popa refuse to be tied to a police-orientated approach to the sex trafficking story designed to search for concrete testimonies and proofs. Instead, they invite us to reflect on what human beings are capable of doing to other human beings. The accumulation of traces gives shape to a psychological project, in which the decisive moment is reworked as a dramatic past in a painful constant repetition. Ultimately, all becomes reduced to the same single story of people caught, traumatized, flown back. It is a story we can choose to narrate from many different perspectives, but Popa urges us to keep it as simple as possible, to keep it to the subject, to keep it close to our hearts.