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| Copyright Adriana-Ioana Cosma |
The July/August Journal of the Royal Photographic Society carries an article on half a dozen graduates who have been following BA or MA photography courses at British universities. One of these is Romanian Adriana-Ioana Costa, who has been studying for a BA in photography at Edinburgh Napier University. The project featured in the double-page spread (pp. 518-19) is Little Red One, about her grandfather: his nickname was Roşiştea, given by his mother when he was born as he had red hair, and he was known as Red in the village. Pre-1989 he was a farmer, and afterwards an independent smallholder in Vărai, a village in the Maramureș. He lived with his wife and mother-in-law (‘whose spirituality combined Orthodox-Christian rites with old pagan rituals’). Cosma lived with them until the age of 5, and visited during holidays afterwards.
She started Little Red One in 2019 as she realised she had not photographed her
late grandmother much and was grateful she could still photograph her
grandfather. Her efforts became part of
her BA submission, though it is as much about the village, where she has
noticed a growing tension in the past 20 years between modernisation and a
desire not to change. Like many places
it is suffering depopulation, with Cosma told in January 2020 that only about
100 people were now living there (down from 275 in the Census of 2011), and no
babies born for years. Of those left, 42
were widowed and living alone, of which Cosma’s grandfather was one. Yet Cosma says that while it is sad to see
signs of decline, there is hope also, with the people keeping going and
maintaining their faith.
Little
Red One
is one of the projects on Cosma’s website, but
the others are not specifically about Romania.
However, her Instagram page has a wider
selection of Romanian photographs. There
are some of the landscape around Vărai, but many capture still life, those
moments suggesting permanence but that we know outside the photograph hold
within them the seeds of decay. Her
grandfather appears in some of the photographs, but surprisingly never a close
portrait (his red hair apparently gone).
It would be nice to see more of Vărai to have a rounded view, though
the overwhelming feeling of these is indeed of decline. There is more life on display in pictures
from the 2019 Marmația winter festival, rural folk traditions transplanted to
an urban setting. They put one in mind
of the Moldovan winter celebrations depicted in Masquerade and
in Felicia Simion’s ethnographies, a more systematic attempt to record customs and folklore across rural Romania.
