The Art of Being Seen and Unseen: The Photography of Adelina Dumitrescu

Written by Epifania Arriagada

There is a haunting beauty in the work of the London-based photographer known on Instagram as photos_frompastfuture and known on other platforms as Adelina Dumitrescu. Her images linger in that space between presence and absence, clarity and blur, intimacy and mystery. She does not loudly promote herself, nor does she maintain a glossy professional website. Instead, she exists everywhere in fragments: on Instagram, on Unsplash, on Medium, and even on the cover of a published book.

What makes her creative journey even more compelling is that photography is only one aspect of her artistry. By profession, she is a UX/UI Product Designer and Researcher with a focus on Inclusive and Accessible Design. That background informs her approach to photography: she is deeply attuned to the ways people interact with images, how design and art can be made inclusive, and how experience itself can be crafted. Her experimental photography is not separate from this—it is part of the same philosophy. Both fields challenge convention, invite discovery, and put the human experience at the center.

Her style is immediately recognizable. Women in flowing white dresses captured in long exposures, blurred into spectral motion. Trees, landscapes, and architecture that feel both familiar and dreamlike. A color palette that alternates between the stark drama of black-and-white and the vibrancy of surreal hues. Each photograph invites the viewer to pause, to see beyond the “ordinary,” as she herself has described it, and to enter into the emotional resonance of image-making that resists easy categorization.

She began her experiments several years ago, using both digital and analogue cameras, often leaning into pinhole techniques and long exposures. In fact, one of her most striking projects was created entirely with an iPhone, using only her own home as a studio. In those images she wore her wedding dress, designed by Nalini Shop, transforming it from garment into apparition. What started as a private project for family and friends became a turning point in her self-discovery: “After I finished this project,” she has said, “I realised that self-portraits helped me to explore myself deeply, to discover pieces of me that I never thought about.”

Her aesthetic is not bound by commercial rules. She rejects the rigidity of industry standards in favor of what she calls “not so ordinary” photography—work that challenges the viewer’s sense of what a photograph should be. This experimental mindset fuels not only her artistic growth but also her generosity. Many of her images are available for free on Unsplash, allowing other creators and writers to incorporate her photography into their own work. In an era when so much art is locked behind paywalls, licenses, and monetization, her willingness to share feels radical. It is a return to a philosophy of art as gift—art as something to be shared, lived with, and built upon.

This approach has had a ripple effect. Her photographs now appear on Medium, often paired with short stories and essays by writers around the world. Most notably, her self-portrait graces the cover of the book Anoxia by M.A. Hernández, proving that her images transcend the digital scroll and take on a physical life of their own. She has written with gratitude that her photo “gets a life” through such projects—an acknowledgment of the ways art can outgrow its maker and belong to others.

I should note that I intentionally did not reach out to her for an interview. There is something to be said for mystery, something rare in a time when so many artists feel compelled to explain themselves, reveal their past missteps, or broadcast every corner of their private lives. Her photography is enigmatic, and so is her presence. To dissect her biography would be to unravel the very threads that make her work so compelling. Her mystery is not a void; it is an atmosphere. It is the quality that keeps me captivated, much like her blurred figures that hover between visibility and disappearance.

There is a paradox at the heart of her work: she is both deeply present and curiously absent. Her self-portraits obscure as much as they reveal. Her Instagram account offers glimpses of her process, yet she remains elusive, allowing the photographs to speak louder than any biography could. This tension is part of her allure. Like the blurred figures in her long-exposure shots, she is an artist who is here and not here—seen and unseen.

The flow of her work mirrors the philosophy that underpins it: art should move freely, inspire, and belong to the collective imagination. In offering her images without restriction, she reminds us that creativity is not just about ownership. It is about connection. And in that space between artist and audience, between the visible and the invisible, her photographs find their true power.