PhotoBooks Romania

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A beautiful, poetic celebration in words and photographs of contemporary Romania, by noted New York photographer Virginia Joffe and Romanian poet Carmen Firan. In collaboration, they memorialize a time when the old world collapses and a new has not yet appeared. Carmen Firan's words are filled with the magical realism of a place that seems, occasionally, harshly ultra-real, and at others, like pure fairy-tale. Virginia Joffe's memorable photographs portray unique hybrid creatures and places that have emerged in Romania from the cracks between millennia. Firan's prose and Joffe's images record the turning over of the wheel of time, the changing of once seemingly immutable orders, the anguish of people struggling to escape history - and to better understand themselves and their traditions.

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More than a decade after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the overthrow and execution of brutal Romanian dictator Nicholas Ceausescu, the worst AIDS epidemic among children in the world bears out its infamous legacy in Romania, still one of the poorest and most fractured societies in Eastern Europe. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, tens of thousands of children in government hospitals and orphanages were systematically infected by unsterilized needles and HIV-tainted blood transfusions given to them instead of fod. When the scandal broke initially, help poured in from all over the world. Blood testing improved; hospitals got disposable syringes; nurses were retrained. But the damage to the children was irreversible, and many began to die. Over this last decade, thousands have died, but almost 10,000 children with AIDS remain. Beginning in 1994 and for the next five years, Magnum photographer Kent Klich traveled to Romania to document the appalling aftermath of Ceausescu's horror. In Children Of Ceausescu, he gives us visceral images and brief life stories of the boys and girls who suffer still from the state's mass experiment. Compassionate yet unflinching, these photographs offer a glimpse of the daily lives of these children, both terrible and mundane. They run and jump in puddles, they laugh out loud and draw pictures of flowers and birds, but they also know disease and death intimately and the realities of their infection are overpowering. It has been over a decade since full disclosure of the facts of this situation has been brought to the world's attention. Conditions have improved, thanks to the intervention of foreign non-governmental organizations and the willingness of Romanian government and medical personnel to finally confront the issue. Even so, the situation is one of sustained crisis without foreseeable end. AIDS in Romania is overwhelmingly among children with no political clout; the Romanian government has failed, through corruption and bureaucracy, to offer hope. There is not enough money for the high-priced, triple-therapy anti-retroviral drugs for all young patients, forcing the caretakers to choose who receives medication and who must suffer without. Many of the multinational drug companies have stood firm in greed and defense of patents and refused to offer discounts on treatments. Ignorance of the situation is now no excuse. These are deaths that are preventable. And there is so much to be done for these innocents - still. Children of Ceausescu was made possible by funding from the Swedish Arts Council, the Hasselblad Foundation, and Save The Children.

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