The National Library of Romania in collaboration with the “G. Oprescu” Institute of Art History of the Romanian Academy organized, on 3rd of July 2024, the second edition of the International Conference “Romanian Photography. Local Perspectives and European Trends“.
The first edition of the Conference took place in 2023 and brought together researchers and historians from Romania and abroad specialized in the history of photography, with the aim to raise more interest on the history of Romanian photography and to stimulate the research in this field. The conference was a complete success among specialists and general public and, as a result, the organizers decided to continue this endeavor offering researchers a new opportunity to present their work.
The papers presented this year approached several themes of history of Romanian photography and analyzed the documentary value of photographs for the history of Romania in the 20th century such as the one about photographs taken by the German officers and photographers dating back to the occupation years of a part of Romania during the First World War (1916-1918) or the one about the photographs of Holocaust orphans after the Second World War (1946, 1947) taken by Aurel Bauh. Another presentation aimed to investigate the photography of Edmund Höfer, a photojournalist for the German-language newspaper Neuer Weg and main figure of art photography in Romania during communist time, and another presented the visual narratives of the car travel photographic albums in the first decades of the 20th century. The photographic practices of a studio from province, Bel Ami from Ploiești, revealed the importance of this type of photo studio for the local community and the figures of the photographers who sustained for decades this activity. Two papers about women photographers and their work, Elly Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari (Nelly) from Greece and two Romanian photographers – Hedy Löffler and Clara Spitzer were received with great interest by the public.
Other papers presented various aspects of the history of Romanian photography in the communist period through ethnographic, architectural photography for collections of albums printed in specialized publishing houses and anonymous photography – the only decontextualized visual witness now of lost personal histories.
The importance of the archival research to identify and retrieve the works of photographers in the records of the photo collections in museums and libraries was once again emphasized in a paper about the glass negatives of Vitold Rola Piekarski from the collection of the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant. Ion Voinescu, a photographer active in the first two decades of the 20th century, and his activity was highlighted in two separate papers, approached from different angles, based on archival research.
The conference was accompanied by a photo exhibition with works by Florin Andreescu, complemented by an exhibition of photographic equipment made between 1950-1990 belonging to ing. Mihai Musceleanu and other private collections.
The event was coordinated by Dr. Adrian-Silvan Ionescu (“G. Oprescu” Institute of Art History of the Romanian Academy) and Dr. Adriana Dumitran (National Library of Romania).
The programme of the conference: https://bibnat.ro/fotografia-romaneasca-perspective-locale-si-tendinte-europene/
