London-based Tamara Robeer is half
Dutch, half Romanian, and has written a short affectionate memoir based on
photographs that had belonged to her father Gerrit Jan Robeer, a few of which
are included. She had inherited a
collection of a couple of hundred of these images, taken between 1970 and 1974,
after his death in 2009. Her article first
appeared in the online photography magazine Love
Issue #7 in 2012.
Born in 1950, in the 1970s Gerrit had
had been an adventurous youth keen on photography and eastern Europe. Romania became a favourite destination,
driving down at a time when travel to the Communist bloc was difficult, and
there he met Tamara’s mother Nela, who had been born in Bucharest.
He made repeated trips and they married
in Bucharest in 1974, though it took a further year, and much pleading, before
Nela was allowed to leave the country.
She wasn’t allowed to take her educational diplomas out, so they
secretly made copies at the Dutch embassy.
Nor could she take the gold trophies she had won at gymnastic
competitions, so her father arranged for the gold to be melted down and made
into a ring.
The photos show Tamara’s parents as they
were in the early 1970s, young and freshly in love. This hairy Dutchman with his western ideas
must have been a breath of fresh air in stuffy buttoned-down Romania, with
Nicolae Ceaușescu increasing his grip on power.
Tamara was born in 1981 in the Netherlands, and was only able to visit
Romania in the mid-1990s, after the 1989 revolution.
Now she has followed in her father’s
footsteps and is a photographer, using the medium to help her understand a
country which, as she puts it, ‘feels so familiar and is completely unknown at
the same time’. Her father’s archive
allows her to explore the way photographs hold on to moments, giving them ‘a
second life’, but at the same time shape our memories of those moments.
Source: Issuu
(This was first published on The Joy of
Mere Words, 2 January 2018)
