GREY DAILY LIFE UNDER COMMUNISM (Romania, 1980s)

In 1980 the Romanian dictator Ceaucescu planned the construction of an enormous monument to himself in the heart of Bucharest. Andrei Pandele decided to record the historic heart of the city in photographs before it was torn down. Very quickly he saw that the demolition was not the most serious crime afoot: erasing every memory of the pre-communist past was exceeded by the deliberate degradation of millions of Romanians who suffered from hunger and cold. Pandele then decided to focus on the drama of ordinary life in Romania. Photographing it was regarded as ‘slandering socialist reality’, and was a criminal offence. For instance, a man who had photographed a long queue waiting at a butcher shop was imprisoned for six years. Ultimately Pandele shot more than 1000 rolls of film. He trained himself to photograph in risky situations without looking through the viewfinder. In this way he created a unique report on the surreal life in communist Romania, with which he could only go public after 1993.