Pour yourself a coffee and plan on doing very little for the next hour.
Wonderful, wonderful photos of Romania on the cusp: the winter of 1989-90.
The photos were taken by Eric Matson, who as he explained in an email to Romania-Economics:
About a month ago I got an email out of the blue from a girl in Romania who had been a gymnast at Deva in 1989/1990 when I shot some photos at her school; she wanted to know if I still had any of those photos. I took a look, and discovered not only some photos of her, but also 300 slides taken around the country in late 1989 (including revolution shots from Cluj) and early 1990.
The full album (and much more besides) can be viewed at his website, Eric Matson Photography.
Enjoy.
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
These pictures are fascinating, intimate and melancholy. They evoke a time of repression and poverty…but simplicity too. It’s hard not to feel a bitter nostalgia for a pre-globalized world with a low-key, local flavor. Not yet awash in techno gadgets, omnipresent marketing, hot brand names for those who can afford them and cheap Chinese goods for those who cannot.
The difference between the 70′s and the 2010′s in terms of gadgets was that in the 70′s people had no problems and no gadgets while in the 2010′s people have lots of problems and lots of gadgets.
I think mankind doensn’t make its life more simple as it evolves, but rather more complicated.
Yes, a certain nostalgia is inevitable. But it has to be let go. Life then was a miserable, poverty stricken existence for most. It might be still for some, but things are getting better and the number of people in poverty falls each year. There has never been a better time to be alive.
Being alive and working for multinational companies doesn’t really mean that you are alive. Actually it could well mean that you’re half-dead.
I kept saying it all the time: if we overthrew Communism to replace it with Corporatism then we’re getting nowhere.
In Communism everybody was the same: working as much as they wanted, having the same opportunities and eating ciorba & mamaliguta cu branza si smantana
In Corporatism people are not the same anymore:
- there are some 0.5% who don’t work at all, have all opportunities in the world and eat caviar
- and there are the others 99.5% who work their asses to death placing money in the pockets of the above, have only the opportunities that the above allow them and eat caviar
So in Communism we were all equal, now the only thing that makes us equal is that we eat with only 1 mouth. Does this come according to God’s principles?!
There will never be peace on this world until everyone will be equal.
It’s one’s right and his duty to place an explosive belt around him and take the lives of the ones who forbid him equal opportunities, even if that means losing his own life.
I never understand it. Did no one have cameras in 1989 and 1990. I would imagine there are many Romanians with many pictures from this period. What has always seemed quite odd to me is that for a relatively large European country, Romania has very little in the way of a history of photography. There are very few internationally recognized photographers from Romania and somehow very little reportage photography from the Ceausescu years. Andrel Panedele’s book “Surprise Witness” seems to be one of the few books out there with pictures from Bucharest in the 1980s. But I guess the Securitate were absolutely diabolical in enforcing their rule against public street photography. Certainly, no other EU capital is like Romania when it comes to photographing on the street which continues to be quite difficult. I have been teaching street photography workshops this summer and all of my students have met with absurd levels of paranoia and anger from Romanians on the street. Somehow no one seems aware of the long history of the genre coming out of Paris in the 1930s and spreading to New York in the 1950s as practiced by the likes of Henri Cartier-Bresson and later Robert Frank. I wish Bucharestians could know that we mean no harm, we are just framing pleasing scenes within our viewfinders for our own pleasure. We are not the SRI, we do not wish to exploit. We are art photographers plain and simple.
No one had cameras in 1989 and 1990.
Back then you didn’t need to have your own camera although some people did own Russian models; when you wanted to take a picture of you, the studio is where you had to go.
At the seaside there were some professional photographers who used to go around the beaches and take pictures for people who wanted a picture and bring it to them the next day. And that was the only moment in 1 year when people would take pictures of themselves, except if they came along a friend who had a camera and happened to take it out on some occasion.
Obviously we can exclude pensioners from this ecuation, as 90% of them didn’t go to the seaside. My grandfather for example had no picture of himself left, we had to scan some PCR id from the 60s so we can put a picture on his cross when he died.
And then there was of course the fear of repression. You had to be crazy to go around taping something at the revolution or at the mineriads, you could have gotten beaten to death by anyone. The general impression back then in Romania was that everyone should mind his own business and not do more than he was supposed to.
Ok Parmalat. But somehow this “general impression” has continued to this day even when there are iPhone 4s and Romania has been a free country for 20 years. There is something very uneducated and primitive when people are afraid of cameras so much. It’s as if certain Bucharestians are unaware of the wider world, of European culture as a whole, of serious art.
Other former Eastern Bloc countries such as the Czech and Slovak Republics and Hungary and Poland have rich photographic histories with many great photographers who are known worldwide. Today there are many top professional photographers working in these countries. In Romania I can count them on one hand. I don’t know if it was specifically because of Ceausescu or just the fact that Romania had such a large rural population that no one took pictures as compared to these other countries. It must be a combination of both things. And if there is no culture of photography then no great artists develop. Pre-World War II in Bucharest I am sure this is a different story and I am currently trying research this.
It seems that a deep chasm was wrought by Ceausescu separating Bucharest from its cultured past that has yet to be re-crossed.
Indeed, pre-WW2 Bucharest was much more open to manifestations of art, including photography.
And nowadays it’s hard to be aware of the wider world with 300 Euro / month.
From speaking with a semi-professional photographer I understood that decent photographic equipment costs around $ 10.000 (not sure if Photoshop license included or not…) so even today this art is not accessible to everyone.
In the times of Ceausescu I think the most promoted form of art was poetry. You would find poems in every newspaper and magazine, on radio and sometimes on tv. Some of them praising the leader and the party of course.
Photography was more like a necessity, you would take a picture of yourself because you needed it for some official document. And it was hard to be otherwise because there was no internet, the press appeared only in black and white and even the coloured magazines only had a few coloured pages, not to mention the low printing quality so where could you promote this art?!
A professional landscape photographer would end up starving with 5000 pictures at his side which were only looked at by his friends… or he would be hired at a newspaper to photograph whatever was needed on a daily basis.
Parmalat,
I understand. All good points, but somehow much smaller countries population-wise within the former Eastern Bloc have long and varied histories of photography and some truly great world renowned photographers. The average wage in Poland is not so big either, but somehow there are schools of photography and it is very competitive there. Here, well. . . For me, there just seems to be a huge gap between the atmosphere of Bucharest as depicted in the photos from the early part of the 20th century and the atmosphere here today. In the pre-WWII photos, Bucharest truly looks like ‘Little Paris’ and there is a very cultured air to the people–the exact opposite of the Bucharest of 2010. It’s as if the people here today bare little resemblance to the people of Bucharest before Communism. Somehow I do not feel this to be the case in other cities in Europe. What the heck happened?!
It happened that Ceausescu brought hundreds of thousands of people from the countryside in order to industrialize the city.
The cream of the city, with its doctors, engineers, lawyers etc… still remained but they can’t all be lawyers in a city that grew from
640.000 inhabitants (1930) to 1.900.000 inhabitants (2002)
So the intellectual elite was covered by the less intellectual masses who were brought over for economic purposes. I don’t think this process happened in any other Communist country or at least not at the same level.
I remember visiting Copsa Mica in 1991. It was the known as the most polluted town in Europe. Houses were indeed black, threes were black, sheeps and shepards, even cat’s and dogs looked black. Locals told us that if they left a bucket of water outside for a few days, it would have a pink/grey oily substance on top of the water.
Back then it was black, now it’s mostly deserted
Actually there wasn’t much difference between the miners and the soldiers, their uniforms seemed to be in an equally poor state.
What’s interesting though is that the population of Bucharest seemed to support the miners. If I remember well, back then 50.000 workers from the industrial platforms of Bucharest joined the miners’ protests… and the miners managed to force the entrance in the Government building [the one protected by APCs] where they only found Gelu Voican Voiculescu who they wanted to throw out the window…
Wow! Discovering such footage is like discovering a small treasure!
Especially the ones with the miners were impressive, I think they belong to one of the mineriads that received less media coverage.
Though one picture in particular made me laugh – there were 4 soldiers on a armored carrier, 2 of them looked like 19 years old, one of them had 200kg and the other looked like he was in his 60s…
and you are?