“Thousands of pictures taken by an amateur photographer in a village some 120 kilometers north of the Moldovan capital, Chisinau, have been put online after being discovered by chance,” reports the website BalkanInsight.
Victor Galusca, a film student working on his thesis, found the box of negatives originally taken by the amateur documentarian Zaharia Cusnir. Cusnir’s long-lost images have been called similar to the story of photographer Vivian Maier, whose work was discovered after her death in 2009 and is currently on view at Fotografiska.
Born in 1912, Cusnir spent his life in the village of Rosietici, which, like the rest of Moldova, was once a part of the Russian Empire, then Romania from 1918–1940, before conjoining with the Soviet Union. Today it is one of the poorest independent countries in Eastern Europe.
He began to take pictures when he was 45, until his passing in 1993.
“During the Communist era, Cusnir was briefly imprisoned for opposing enrollment in a collective farm, and then spent most of his active life as a collective farm laborer,” continues the BalkanInsight story.
These pictures are amateur in name only. Accidental documents of legacy is a more precise description. The shots were taken by someone with a clear vision and desire to document real life in the Soviet era, “in a manner that breaks free of the shackles of propaganda and the official discourse of the time.”
Although the photos are awash with the moody solemnity of pre-war Jewish shtetl and ghetto images by photographers like Roman Vishniac, these have a curious optimistic sensibility.
Cusnir learned the craft from his nephew, a local photographer for the village he was living in. Cusnir became the default documentary photographer for the villages Casunca, Rogojeni, Tsira, Ghindesti, Rosietici and Cenusa.
The National Museum in Moldova has staged an exhibition of Cusnir’s work, and three more have been organized in Romania.