(Almost) Forgotten Faces from Soviet Moldova

21 October 2020

An article published on the Radio Free Europe website in January this year draws our attention to an extraordinary collection of photographs of Moldovan rural life from the 1950s and 60s:

‘In the spring of 2016, film student Victor Galusca was exploring a sleepy village in his native Moldova when the 23-year-old noticed some photographic negatives in the rubble of an abandoned house. The discarded pictures were the life’s work of Zaharia Cusnir, an unknown amateur photographer who died in 1993.’

Here is the complete article and a link to the Zaharia website. Another account can be found on the EEP (Eastern European Photography) Berlin site. 

As visitors to this blog will know, I am fascinated by images of life in earlier times in the countries of east and central Europe, particularly arresting black-and-white photographs of unnamed people such as these.  See my earlier blogposts about a rediscovered collection of photographs from Romania – Rescuing Images of 20th-century Romania, Romanian Faces and Photographs of Romanian Dress from the 1930s and 1940s.

December 2022 – Here’s a recent article from the New York Times about Zaharia Cusnir and his photographs.