Inside Out Under Bucharest, created by Italian photographer and anthropologist Massimo Branca between 2013 and 2015 in Bucharest, documents a homeless community that formed an underground household in heating tunnels near Gara de Nord.
The project examines urban marginalization, social exclusion, and the ways people construct family beyond biological ties. Many residents were shaped by Romania's post-communist transition and by the long consequences of Nicolae Ceaușescu's pronatalist policies, which contributed to overcrowded institutions and generations of abandoned children. Branca approaches the tunnels not simply as a site of deprivation, but as a social system organized through shared shelter, meals, hierarchy, care, and dependence. At its center is the community leader known as Bruce Lee, who brought electricity into the tunnels, prepared food, and assumed a paternal role for people who had often grown up without stable homes.
Visually, the photographs move between cramped interiors and the streets above them. Tight framing reflects the limited physical space, while close views of sleeping bodies, washed dishes, religious prints, improvised wiring, and acts of grooming or drug use describe a fragile domestic environment. Electric bulbs create pockets of warm artificial light, interrupted by blackouts illuminated by candles; exterior winter scenes introduce a colder, more open atmosphere. The resulting mood is tense and intimate.
Over three years, Branca spent about nine months living and interacting with the community, drawing on anthropological methods of observation, dialogue, and trust-building. He did not stage scenes, instead photographing events as they unfolded and using the tunnels' existing light. This slow process allowed him to challenge depictions of the site as a spectacle of misery and to acknowledge his own unequal position as someone who could leave.
The project received the Magnum 30 Under 30 award in 2015 and was shortlisted for several emerging-photographer and humanitarian photography honors. It appeared in publications including National Geographic and Stern, and was published in book form in 2016 as Inside Outside Under Bucharest. The series also records the end of the community: after Bruce Lee's arrest in July 2015, residents were evicted and the tunnels were sealed, turning Branca's photographs into a record of a social world that no longer existed in the same form.
