Romania, 1990: beyond the headlines
In our world of digital photography and high speed Internet, photojournalists can quickly and easily send large numbers of high-res photos to the other side of the globe. Things weren’t always so convenient.
Thanks to some amazing events, in January 1990, my life changed in just one day and I became photographer correspondent of AFP for Romania. That year was for me the most beautiful and also the most creative, an exciting time of celebrating the newfound freedom after the fall of the communist regime in Romania.
As a “news” photographer, I and two colleagues from Reuters and AP were “the wire” photographers – the first ones on the scene when news breaks. Our value was our speed, and speed also determined our content. Because the transmission of a single image took from 5 to 15 minutes, we were trained to take shots that summed up the event in a single image – getting the picture – rather than in a series of images that collectively told a story. Thus, a wire service photographer excelled in getting a single summary image and the most important thing for us was speed in an environment where publications subscribed to all three major wire services.
But in 1990, the transmission of a photo to the wire services wasn’t an easy job. You had to first shoot the image on film, take an hour or so to process and dry the film, then go into the darkroom to edit and print the image, another hour; type the caption on a typewriter using pressure sensitive labels, attach the caption to the side of the image. The print was wrapped around the cylinder on the sending machine – an analog drum transmitter (consisting to a combination of a kind of analogical scanner and a fax machine) The drum rotates at a consistent speed while a scanning beam moves slowly across the photo, scanning one line at a time. It was needed 5-15 minutes per image, 45-60 minutes for color, once each through red, green and blue filters. One little “hit” in the line (black lines that would show up in the image due to analog line noise) and you had to start all over again, because there was no way to correct the image. No modular plugs on phones then. The microphone had pulled and replaced with the wires from the transmitter. Unhooked phone from the machine to talk to the newsroom, making sure pix were coming in.
This is a selection of some images made in 1990 as they were transmitted to AFP desk in Paris. They are 18×24 scanned prints, handmade in the makeshift darkroom of the InterContinental’s #220 room, the place where AFP are opened its first office in Romania.
Romania, 1990: beyond the headlines
In our world of digital photography and high speed Internet, photojournalists can quickly and easily send large numbers of high-res photos to the other side of the globe. Things weren’t always so convenient.
Thanks to some amazing events, in January 1990, my life changed in just one day and I became photographer correspondent of AFP for Romania. That year was for me the most beautiful and also the most creative, an exciting time of celebrating the newfound freedom after the fall of the communist regime in Romania.
As a “news” photographer, I and two colleagues from Reuters and AP were “the wire” photographers – the first ones on the scene when news breaks. Our value was our speed, and speed also determined our content. Because the transmission of a single image took from 5 to 15 minutes, we were trained to take shots that summed up the event in a single image – getting the picture – rather than in a series of images that collectively told a story. Thus, a wire service photographer excelled in getting a single summary image and the most important thing for us was speed in an environment where publications subscribed to all three major wire services.
But in 1990, the transmission of a photo to the wire services wasn’t an easy job. You had to first shoot the image on film, take an hour or so to process and dry the film, then go into the darkroom to edit and print the image, another hour; type the caption on a typewriter using pressure sensitive labels, attach the caption to the side of the image. The print was wrapped around the cylinder on the sending machine – an analog drum transmitter (consisting to a combination of a kind of analogical scanner and a fax machine) The drum rotates at a consistent speed while a scanning beam moves slowly across the photo, scanning one line at a time. It was needed 5-15 minutes per image, 45-60 minutes for color, once each through red, green and blue filters. One little “hit” in the line (black lines that would show up in the image due to analog line noise) and you had to start all over again, because there was no way to correct the image. No modular plugs on phones then. The microphone had pulled and replaced with the wires from the transmitter. Unhooked phone from the machine to talk to the newsroom, making sure pix were coming in.
This is a selection of some images made in 1990 as they were transmitted to AFP desk in Paris. They are 18×24 scanned prints, handmade in the makeshift darkroom of the InterContinental’s #220 room, the place where AFP are opened its first office in Romania.
