Romania, Summer 1990

I’m delighted that some of my very early photograph from Romania, photographed during the summer of 1990, appears in the latest issue of Studies in Photography magazine.

I was invited a little while back by photographer Robin Gillanders to contribute some of my photography work which people maybe didn’t know so well, or may not have seen, or that was long forgotten, and I went back to some my earliest work from Bucharest, Romania. These images, and the accompanying text that I wrote, tell the story of the summer of unrest in post-Communist Bucharest, only a few months after the December 1989 fall of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu.

That summer of 1990 was my first big trip abroad trying to become a photojournalist. There were many established photographers working in Bucharest that summer, and I tagged along, all eyes and ears, trying to learn from them. Some of my resulting images went on to be included in the portfolio of images which won me the inaugural Ian Parry Memorial Award from The Sunday Times, in 1991.

The majority of my images appearing in the Studies in Photography magazine are published for the first time, and were only recently scanned up from the negatives during my large 2021 project looking at and organising my archive.

Thanks to Robin and Studies in Photography for inviting me to revisit my Romania work.

To read of the work please do consider buying a copy of the magazine, and helping sustain writing about photography from Scotland. “Studies in Photography is the biannual journal published by the Scottish Society for the History of Photography. It uses in-depth essays to look at and analyse important historical and contemporary images, helping the public engage with photography and understand it in a new way.”

Studies in Photography Summer 2025

As well as the usual array of news, reviews and articles this issues includes features on:

Sylwia Kowalczyk

Graham Fagen

Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert

Sara Stevenson

Don Paterson

The New Contemporaries for this issue include:

Gabriela Pieniazek

Laetitia Heisler

Graham Williams

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