An archive showcasing a century of Romanian public and private life in analogue photography.

Azopan, an expanding online archive of 100 years of analogue photographs, collects a wealth of public and private moments captured in numerous photographs tucked away in corners of houses or other storage areas, rescued from oblivion and deterioration and made accessible. to the public.

Photography has always played an important role in the family Edgar Sechinitiator Azopane. His paternal grandfather was an amateur photographer, as was his father, who was also a member of the photography club in Târgu Mures, while his mother worked in the city’s photographic materials factory. He started taking photographs at an early age, when he was eight years old. Although he did not choose photography as a profession, he retained a passion for the field and an interest in preserving the legacy of analog photography.

The basis of Azopan’s archive was his family collection of photographs. There were so many people around him who were into or interested in photography, so there was more available than usual. As an adult, he came up with the idea of ​​collecting photographs so they wouldn’t get lost, and after a while he began digitizing them. By scanning them, he realized that some of the images were not necessarily private and could be of interest to the wider public. He planned to group them all into an archive, but this was nothing more than an idea until 2010, when the Fortepan archive appeared in Hungary. According to Söç, this was the inspiration for Azopan when developing the collection and presenting the images. The similarities can be found right down to the name. Fortepan is a Hungarian brand of black and white film, and Azopan is a Romanian brand of the same product.

Beginning in 2014, he began collecting and digitizing photographs more consistently, and in 2017 he approached two school colleagues, Lorand-Felix Foureau and Lorand Fülep, with an archive project. One is a pastor, but also a photographer, the other is a programmer; together they founded Azopan, which became available to the public in 2018.

There are about 20,000 photographs published in the online database, but the collection is much wider: about 100,000 digitized photographs, and the same number of materials awaiting processing. Maintaining and developing the archive is a labor of love. “We don’t have time to process everything quickly,” he says. “It’s a passion for us and we do it in our free time.”

The idea to develop the archive through donations was there from the very beginning, following the example of Fortepan. “At first we even placed advertisements in Tirgu Mures newspapers asking people to donate if they had photographs and didn’t know what to do with them. This is the model we adopted from Fortepan.” Azopan, which continually receives content, now includes collections of photographers contributed by families or individuals themselves, various private donations and even contributions from several museums.

“On the one hand, we are doing research and looking for photographs, but on the other hand, we have received a lot of things because people heard about the project and contacted us to donate photographs and materials.” In some cases, Azopan was only responsible for digitizing photographs and obtaining permission to publish them.

The archive contains photographs from all over the country, sometimes from abroad, since even during communism some people traveled outside of Romania. “Since we are from Targu Mures, we probably have more photos from Ardel (Transylvania region). It just happened, but we have photos from all over the country,” he explains.

Tirgu Mures, a city in central Romania, has its place in the history of local photography as it was home to the country’s only photographic materials factory (Uzina de Materiale Fotosensibile Azomureş) between 1981 and 2003. The predecessor was a workshop opened in 1947 by brothers Imre and Attila Horvath, also from the city, where photographic paper was produced. The enterprise was supposed to solve the problem of a shortage of photographic materials after the war, which their photographer sister and many others faced. It was nationalized in 1949 and eventually became a small state-funded factory. Before the new plant opened in 1981, it produced various types of photographic paper, but not film. In the 1970s it was transferred to Azomures, where a larger plant project for the production of photosensitive materials was later developed.

In addition to copyright criteria, various images have been and may be added to the archive. “We’re just seeing if it could be something interesting. Does this photograph document something that might be interesting over time?” These can be photographs of cities that in a few decades will no longer look the same, portraits, scenes of home life, historical or social events, collected with an understanding of the nostalgia that people feel when looking for things from their childhood or their hometown, but also how subjective the experience of looking at a photograph can be. All of them are available for viewing, downloading or sharing by anyone.

In the future, the project will be expanded with additional contributions. “We collect, digitize, publish, store, date, research. It would be helpful to have some volunteers who could help, and it would be good if we could find the time to find funding,” he explains. Until now, any costs associated with equipment or various trips were covered by the founders of the project. “I do it because I enjoy it. I spent thousands of hours on this project.”

For the first time this year, Azopan received funding from the Administration of the National Cultural Foundation (AFCN) to digitize the magazine. Uy Elet (New life)a magazine about culture and society in Hungarian, published in Tirgu Mures between 1958 and 1996. Digitized issues of the magazine and photographs used to illustrate it are available in the online archive. Anyone can also see in which issue of the magazine they found the corresponding photo. For the project, they worked with the Mures County Library, where most of the magazine’s archive was available, and digitized all the photographs they found. “Some of the photographers who worked for the magazine took some of the negatives when they left, but we are trying to find as many as possible. It’s quite interesting, at least for us.” Overall, this is another step in preserving and disseminating the local heritage of analogue photography.

(Photo at the opening: student celebration in Sighisoara in 1980, photo by Klaas Eldering. from Azopan.ro)

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