Școala de educație vizuală

Photography Program, 2 Years, with Diploma

Complete training for the next generation of photography professionals

The program combines academic structure with professional requirements, promising that by the end of the two years, graduates will be prepared both for commercial photography and for a future artistic path.

It is a program suitable for anyone who wants to work in photography and image-making, whether it is a first career choice or a career change, commercial or artistic photography. Over the course of the two years, you will learn all the necessary elements to understand and practice photography; we promise that after graduating, you will realize that you are prepared for almost any kind of situation, brief, or artistic context.

We do not require previous experience. We start from zero.

Practical Information

Next session: September 15, 2026 – June 13, 2028
Qualification: Photographer (COD COR 343101), Level 4 according to the National Qualifications Framework and the European Qualifications Framework
Graduation diploma: qualification certificate in the profession of photographer; CdRF is accredited by the Ministry of Labour and Social Solidarity, through the Commission for the Authorization of Adult Vocational Training Providers in the Municipality of Bucharest, and the graduation certificate is recognized at European level.
Duration: 2 years
Language: Romanian and English. Some courses are taught by international lecturers and translation is not guarenteed.
Available spots: maximum 15
Location: CdRF, Popa Tatu 68, Bucharest; Studio 82, for the studio photography course; online, for lessons with international lecturers
Class schedule: 2–3 lessons per week. Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, 18:00–21:00, plus Saturdays and/or Sundays, generally 11:00–17:00
Final assessment: theoretical and practical examination, plus the diploma project presented publicly

Download the full program specification (PDF) here.

Payment options

2-installment plan (total price: 29,750 lei): 2 installments of 14,875 lei; you pay one installment now and the next one in September 2027.

10-installment plan (total price: 31,000 lei): 4,000 lei down payment + 10 installments of 2,700 lei; you pay the down payment now, and the installments are paid once every two months, by the 10th of the month, after invoicing.

20-installment plan (total price: 32,000 lei): 4,000 lei down payment + 20 installments of 1,400 lei; you pay the down payment now, and the monthly installments are paid for the current month, by the 10th of the month, after invoicing.

If you want to suggest another option (more installments, fewer installments, etc.), drop us a line at hello@cdrf.ro.

First year – learn the language and develop your skills

You start with the basics of photography, so that you can acquire the language of this art, general cultural knowledge, specific references, and the technical knowledge you need. Six months in which you cover photographic technique and composition, the history of photography, studio, digital processing, street photography, film and developing, visual storytelling, and your first workshops on personal style and critique.

From February, you deepen your visual culture: you enter the field of visual anthropology and move beyond the boundaries of European and American photography, with a course dedicated to photography from China and Japan. You deepen your post-processing skills in Lightroom, learn writing techniques and how to work with concepts, and learn to develop series and projects.

Spring and summer bring two major things. First: documentary photography, a five-month course in which you develop an idea into a photographic essay with accompanying text, with individual feedback sessions in small groups. Second: 60 hours online with Panos Kasimis, in the workshops The Open Image and Strangely Familiar, about the image that remains open to interpretation. Meeting Point also takes place during this period.

Second year – shifting from exercise to authorship

You enter the challenges of studio photography, with ten weekend days in a professional studio – portrait, product, and commercial photography, including a simulation of a real project. You continue with advanced post-processing in Photoshop and explore the ways in which you could present your work, including a zine workshop in which you actually produce a publication.

From November, you begin the photographic project course, where you define the theme of your diploma project. Spring brings the course on women photographers in history, and from March you enter the final stage: the diploma project, under the individual guidance of a mentor.

Year 1 involves many more teacher-led lessons, guided practice, and acquiring information. Year 2 shifts the emphasis elsewhere: fewer class hours, much more individual work, and much more real-world practice alongside us.

Andrei Păcuraru on the photographic project

Cristina Irian on types of photographers

You become one of us

For the hands-on training, you will become part of CdRF. This means that we will give you photography briefs for our events, send you to photograph events organized by our collaborators (for example, theatre), our photographers will take you along to shoots as an assistant, you will be with us when we plan, curate, and install exhibitions, and you will always have a guaranteed place at any artist talk or professional presentation at CdRF.

Essentially, we make all our resources available to you with an educational purpose. You will also have priority access to our international events: Meeting Point 2027, when we will once again bring five international experts, curators, gallerists, and agents, who will hold workshops, portfolio reviews, and talks in Bucharest; our collaboration with Capa Center, the contemporary photography center in Budapest; and other initiatives that we will develop in the meantime.

This is the part of the training that a classroom cannot reproduce. You see how the work is done, under real conditions, with real deadlines and responsibilities.

The Diploma Project and International Mentorship

The final four months of the program are dedicated to your diploma project, which concludes with an individual exhibition. You choose your mentor from a list of international experts proposed by us and work individually with them, online, in four to five meetings. A mentor works with a maximum of three students, so that there is real time available for each project. They accompany you throughout the entire process; from clarifying the concept, to selecting and sequencing the images, all the way to the final form of the work that will be exhibited.

Your teachers

Ionuț Staicu – studio photography

Photographer with over twenty years of career in fashion, beauty and advertising. He received his first camera, a Smena, in the 9th grade, and a family friend taught him how to develop. He began his professional collaborations in 1998, with the Elite Model Look agency, and entered fashion photography with the launch of Cosmopolitan in Romania. This was followed by editorials for Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, Glamour and GQ, award-winning advertising campaigns for Romanian clothing brands and collaborations with modeling agencies from abroad. Since 2021, he has been part of Studio 82 – the very studio where the advanced course is held – and in recent years he has reoriented his portfolio towards culinary, still life and corporate photography.

Cristina Irian – the history of photography

Artist with a research-based practice, visual arts researcher and curator. She studied sociology in Trento and Regensburg, visual anthropology in Bucharest and Perugia, and has a PhD in visual arts from UNArte. She works with vernacular photographs, objects and archive fragments, which she reactivates in installations, photo-objects and experimental publications, a practice guided by the motto "No one left behind" and focused on objects of memory. She has participated in over 50 exhibitions in Romania and Europe, is a member of the Union of Visual Artists and the European platform Futures, and leads OMNIA PHOTO, the association that organizes the Romanian Photobook Award. In 2026 she represented Romania in the PHOTOMINO EUROPE project, presented at the Hamburg Photography Triennial.

Panos Kasimis – theory, criticism and image interpretation; teaches in English

A freelance photographer for nearly four decades, his career has been built between personal projects turned into books and exhibitions, and commissions for magazines, institutions, and independent publications. His work explores social behavior through the physicality of human contact and people’s relationship with the urban and natural environment, a photography so tactile that it feels like you can feel the sounds and smells of the scene. He has exhibited solo in Athens, Rome, Eindhoven, and Juneau (Alaska), and in group exhibitions in London, Paris, Rome, and Istanbul. He has published three books: Days Away (2009), Urban Diaries (2013), with a foreword by Larry Fink, and Babylon (2024).

Andrei Păcuraru – photographic technique and project

He has been taking photos since he was 16 and teaching since he was 20. Self-taught, he developed his style through commercial photography, photojournalism and conceptual photography, and currently works predominantly artistically. Geometric shapes are his creative catalyst; he seeks them equally in street photography, portraiture and conceptual works. He is a founding member of the National Association for Contemporary Visual Arts, has exhibited nationally and internationally, and is the custodian of the PAC Collection, a personal archive started in 2006 that includes over 10,000 unpublished photographs. He thinks in series and projects, and this is directly visible in the way he teaches.

Alexandru Busuioceanu – digital post-processing and workflow

Trained as a classical musician, he came to photography through the viewfinder and for seventeen years this has been his job. He started in editorial and is today a very active commercial photographer with a constant portfolio of corporate, event and project commissions. In parallel, his interest in people, stories and initiatives with a social stake led him to collaborations with the Bucharest Community Foundation and the Red Cross, and in 2025 he coordinated the team of photographers of the Contrast: Nature in urban project, exhibited at Cărturești Carusel. His personal practice was exhibited at the CdRF in January 2026, with HABITAT: Infrared – an infrared exploration of the wild nature of Bucharest, made together with the Urban Rangers of the Natural Park. He maintains his creativity by constantly approaching new techniques and themes.

Ioana Moldovan – documentary photographer

Freelance photojournalist and documentary photographer, writer and published author. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, BBC, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Bloomberg, GEO, Libération, Al Jazeera English, NPR, Deutsche Welle and Vice, among others, and she has worked on multimedia projects funded by the European Commission and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. In 2016, she participated in the Eddie Adams Workshop, where she received the Bill Eppridge Award for Excellence and Truth in Photojournalism, and the US Embassy in Bucharest awarded her the "Women of Courage" award. She has won first prize at Superscrieri, the documentary-photojournalism section, first prize at the Romanian Visual Awards 2024, a HIPA Medal of Merit in Dubai and was shortlisted for the Sony World Photography Awards. Her book We are Invictus received the photography book award at The Most Beautiful Books in Romania.

Toma Hurduc – street photography and portfolio

He studied image at UNATC. He frequently works with analog techniques and various forms of print and presentation, and through photography he questions the perception of reality, fear, anxiety, ephemerality and the way memory is constructed. He works on long-term projects and edits the zine Past Few Days. In 2025, his project Two Suns was exhibited at CdRF as part of the DOOM MOOD exhibition, in dialogue with the works of Italian photographer Giulia Mangione; the exhibition then traveled to Norway, at Nitja Center, as part of the Next Generation of Artists program. He was nominated on the European platform Futures. In addition to photography, he writes and publishes visual journalism.

Cornel Lazia – story-building in photography

Photographer, visual artist and PhD university lecturer at UNATC, where he coordinates projects and exhibitions of Photography students. He has a PhD in cinematography and media, with a research on types of cinematic montage as a source of inspiration in photographic discourse – exactly the field he teaches in this program. Over two decades of experience in commercial photography: fashion, advertising, music album covers, corporate. In parallel, an artistic practice constantly exhibited, with exhibitions such as Horizon Tales, Monolith, an Expression of Viewing or Contact. He is interested in borders and their visual dialogue, as well as the mutual influences between the film image and photography. He was a jury member at the Romanian Visual Awards.

Natan Dvir – personal style and mentoring; teaches in English

A New York-based photographer with an MBA from Tel Aviv University and an MFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts. He has taught at the International Center of Photography in New York and currently directs the education program at the Houston Center for Photography. His work focuses on the human dimension of cultural, social, and political issues and has been published by the New York Times Magazine, Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, Stern, Die Zeit, Time, and Paris Match, among others. His series Coming Soon, about New York’s giant billboards and the people who walk beneath them, and Platforms, a triptych constructed on subway platforms, have earned him the LensCulture Emerging Talent Award and exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, the Hamburg Photo Triennial, and Christie’s London. He is represented by Polaris Images.

Andrei Crăciun – writing and conceptualization techniques

Journalist and writer. He has been a journalist since 2005, when he won the "Talent of the Year" award; he headed the journalism department of the newspaper Adevărul and was named the best young culture journalist, the best columnist and the best reporter in Romania. He has a bachelor's degree in political science, a master's degree in Hebrew culture and civilization and a doctorate summa cum laude, all from the University of Bucharest, and studied at the Escuela de Escritores in Madrid. He has published over thirty volumes of prose, poetry, essays and fictionalized biographies, was included in the European project Connecting Emerging Literary Artists and has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch. He has been teaching writing courses for many years and has founded a publishing house through which he has published his students.

Matei Dumitru – film photography and developing

He created °isopatrusute, the film photography lab in Bucharest. With a background in cinematography, he is concerned with bridging the gap between creativity and practice: through the lab and his knowledge, he offers photographers the technical means necessary to bring their projects to fruition. The laboratory works with the C-41, E-6, black-and-white and ECN-2 processes, on formats from 35 mm and 120 to large format, and is one of the landmarks of the revival of film photography in Romania – a topic he has spoken about, among others, on Radio Romania Cultural.

What you need to enroll

Minimum high-school education
A camera with a detachable lens
Romanian-language skills sufficient to follow a course
We do not require previous experience in photography
We do not require a portfolio or showing your previous work at enrollment

How to enroll

The group has a maximum of 15 spots, which are filled in the order of registration. Choose one of the payment options above and follow the payment steps.

What happens afterward

The program is accredited for the profession of photographer, and at the end you leave with a portfolio built over the course of two years and a personal project presented publicly. Graduates can work in studio, product, and commercial photography, event photography, documentary and editorial photography, as assistants on set and in the studio, or they can continue along their own artistic path, with projects, publications, and exhibitions.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need to have previous knowledge in photography?

No. The program starts from zero, and the first part of Year 1 is built specifically for this.

Can I follow the course if I have a job?

Yes. Classes are held on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings and on weekends. If we make changes to the schedule, we guarantee that we will take work schedules into account, and during the week we will only schedule lessons in the second half of the day.

Do I need Romanian?

Yes. Most of the course is taught in Romanian and translation is not guaranteed.

What equipment do I need?

To begin with, a digital camera with a detachable lens. You will also need a laptop with the Adobe suite installed.

What happens if I miss a lesson?

We do not impose mandatory attendance, but you should be aware that it is important to attend the lessons. When you miss a class, the teacher will go over what you missed and will help you catch up.

What happens if I withdraw during the program?

We terminate the educational contract by mutual agreement. If you have paid the downpayment and withdraw within the first two weeks, we will refund your downpayment. If you chose the two-installment option and withdraw at some point without completing the entire first year, we will refund the difference (the amount depends on how much of the course you have completed). Otherwise, if you chose the monthly or every two month installment option, you simply stop making payments.

What does the cost include?

The cost includes access to all course hours, access to the CdRF studio, materials used during the course for certain practical sessions, and production of the individual diploma exhibition.