Catalina, 17, sits at the entrance to series of tunnels underneath the Gara de Nord train station in Bucharest. After being abandoned after birth, she grew up in an orphanage and then lived on the street and in the tunnels starting at age 12.
One Girl’s Tunnel Life: Under the Streets of Bucharest
Photographer Massimo Branca takes us into the underground world of a street family in Romania.
Photographer and anthropologist Massimo Branca first met Catalina in 2013 when she was 17 years old.
“Her large, black eyes seemed to become more mysterious the longer I looked at them,” he said. “It took me a lot to understand just how much she had been through in her short life.”
At the time, Catalina was living with a group of homeless people in, around, and under the Gara de Nord train station in Bucharest, Romania. She was left in the hospital at birth, raised in an orphanage until age six, then was reunited with her family only to run away at age 12. At 13 she started using intravenous drugs.
Branca photographed Catalina’s life as part of a larger project
