With a photojournalism career spanning over 40 years in both Romania and the United States, Emanuel Tânjală (b. 1944) pays, through the exhibition open at the National Library between December 9, 2019 and March 31, 2020, a tribute to Romania and the Romanians who were, in the first months of 1990, at the beginning of a turbulent path to regaining democracy.

This catalogue reproduces all 100 photographs featured in the exhibition, taken by the well-known photojournalist Emanuel Tânjală, who returned to the country specifically in January 1990, after an exile of almost a decade.

With the sharp eye of a press photographer eager to record for posterity the exceptional events that Romania was going through, Emanuel Tânjală began taking photographs right from the plane he was on, on January 13, 1990, from New York. His first contact with Romanian reality was Bucharest, marked by the revolutionary days – the destroyed buildings around the Romanian Television and those in Revolution Square (Palace Square). Day after day, for several months, he was an active witness, immortalizing on photographic film the country’s rebirth: the street demonstrations, the protests in University Square, the first meeting of the Provisional Council of National Union (CPUN), the Flower Bridge over the Prut, first elections in May 1990.

With his camera in hand, he travelled through towns and villages, yet constantly returned to the demonstrations in Bucharest. Everywhere he went, he especially looked at the people’s faces. Just as in the period before the exile he had sought stories of a life lived humbly at the mercy of the earth in the faces furrowed by old age and in the hard-working hands of peasants, between January 13 and June 11, 1990 he would capture the faces of Romanians emerging from the grey despair of the final communist decade. Taken 30 years ago, these documentary photographs demonstrate a disturbing power of evocation. For those who lived through that era, they bring back to consciousness, sometimes brutally, uncomfortable, painful fragments of reality. For the very young, they serve instead as an invitation on a past they never lived through, but which contains lessons that cannot be ignored.