Like the photos in the Pictorial Photography in America 1922 collection, these images are from a distant era, but also from a distant place. Romania is a country less visited by Americans and Romania’s small presence in our literature and pop-culture leaves the country far from our consciousness. This absence of a mental imagery makes the scenes in these photos all the more exotic and fascinating.

The photos on this page are copies of postcards made, presumably, from the original photographs. The quality is undoubtedly degraded through the copying and the reduction in size from the originals, as well as the process of copying the photos yet another time in my office (though my copies are actually quite true to the postcards from which they were made). Nevertheless, they inspire our imagination as we look at them and try to picture the people and places where they were made.

Also like the Pictorial Photography in America 1922 collection they have remarkable composition. The photos almost certainly were made with a large format camera on a tripod. This would have required careful preparation and intentional planning. These are not snapshots.

As documentary photography, these are wonderfully successful. We have no way of knowing what was the objective of the photographer, or the organization that sponsored the photos, but the absence of this knowledge simply adds to the mystery for us of the world in which they were taken.