All Grants | Cycle 1 –
Dr. Uschi Klein is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Brighton, United Kingdom. Her research focuses on photography during Romania’s communist era (1947-1989), with a specific interest in exploring everyday resistance, marginalized voices, and hidden histories of the country’s past. Klein‘s research outputs include photography exhibitions in Romania and Sweden, as well as peer-reviewed publications. In 2023, she was a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department for Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University in Stockholm, Sweden, and in 2025, she was a Visegrad Fellow at the Open Society Archive in Budapest, Hungary.
Links
Profile Links
Faculty Page at University of Brighton
Uschi Klein‘s Website
Publication Links
“I Never Saw Any Socialism,” interview with Dan Perjovschi in Miejsce, No. 10 (2024).
“Silenced by Oppression But Resisting Through Photography: Vernacular Photography During Romania’s Communist Era (1947-1989)” in Silenced Voices and the Media: Who Get’s to Speak?. James Morrison and Sarah Pedersen, eds. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).
“The Home Darkroom During Romania’s Communist Era” in PhotoResearcher, No. 41: 122-133 (April 2004).
Other Links
10×10 Research Grant Presentation Video (Uschi Klein—00:54:53)
Summary of Research Supported by 10×10 Photobooks Grant:
Clara Spitzer and Women Photographers in Communist Romania
Within my overall focus on photography as a form of cultural resistance to the repressive regime in Romania (1947-1989), my research aims to expand the photographic scholarship through a specific focus on Romanian women photographers. Building on my previous research on vernacular photography and linking it to photographic histories in other contexts, my current research has two key areas of focus. The first centers on visual records created by Romanian women photographers during the country’s communist rule and aims to deepen the knowledge of photography as a form of cultural resistance. The second focuses on individual and collective narratives and practices within the context of everyday life during these forty-four years, aiming to provide a new way of accessing historical experience and broadening the methodological toolkit for cultural historians.
Using a critical approach rooted in an understanding of everyday life that recognizes the value of the banal, repetitive and unnoticed, and the importance of quotidian events, the photography central to my research is characterized by social and ideological uses and practices, rather than aesthetic qualities. My research examines photography within an interdisciplinary field of critical investigation by analyzing women photographers and their overlooked and unknown photographic images and practices within specific cultural and socio-political contexts and repressed histories. Taking photography’s mnemonic quality into account, this research considers the camera not as a neutral recording device but as an active mediating construction and an imagined version of a complex and contradictory present and futurity that a later viewer will encounter. The photography examined in this research provides a means of extending discussions of untold narratives, repressed histories and changing interpretations of the past, locating them in the present and orienting them towards the future. By bringing these photographic images and practices into circulation to delineate the collective memory, this research highlights the significance of cultural memory and social change.
The significance of my research on Communist Romania offers an interesting case study of a society cut off from the ubiquitous visual culture of the 20th century. Life under the Romanian totalitarian system was not something to be chosen or refused; it was the only social reality known to people. Essentially, people spent their entire lives under the same totalitarian conditions. Thus, it is imperative to reappropriate the past through these personal stories and narratives, and through the powerful tool of photography, rather than referring only to the official discourse of collective memory. The tendency of the latter is to make generalizations and to gloss over the differences between personal memories and the official story with its ideological bias. By investigating photography from Romania’s communist era, the images illuminate something outside the Western experience and distant times, inviting the viewer to reflect on the world in the context of contemporary oppressive and authoritarian regimes. In that sense, photographs have their own
agency.
There is comparatively little ‘official’ photographic documentation of the harsh realities of everyday life during Romania’s communist era. The single-party rule of the Romanian Communist Party, which was led by Nicolae Ceauşescu between 1965 and 1989 and used a neo-Stalinist ideological system of coercion, austerity, fear and dissent, controlled the professional use of photography. Similar to other neighboring communist countries at the time, state-sanctioned photographs were used as propaganda that eluded any visual reference to the socialist reality as it really was. However, traces of everyday life during this era materialized through ‘unofficial’ photographs. These were often taken by amateur and artist-photographers, men and women, many of whom were members of the Association of Artists Photographers in Romania (AAFR). The AAFR was the only photography association, and indeed movement, in Romania that was accepted by Ceauşescu’s regime.
One woman photographer from Romania, Clara Spitzer (1918–2013), was a founding member of the AAFR, which also published the magazine Fotografia every two months between 1968 and 1990. While Spitzer was recognized as an important photographer during Romania’s communist era, her photographic work is not widely known or disseminated, especially not in the Anglophone world. My research fills in this gap and sheds light on her work and this underrepresented research area.
The existing, largely not yet digitalized archival material that supports my research includes photographs, photo albums, the Association of Artists Photographers magazine Fotografia, photography publications, bulletins, portfolios, scrapbooks and interviews in public archives and private collections in Romania. Key archive collections are held at the Association of Artists Photographers in Romania, the Museum of the Romanian Peasant and the National Archives of Romania (Records of the Secret Police and Photo Collection of Romanian Communism) in Bucharest, and the Minerva photography archive in Cluj.
With the generous help of the 10×10 Photobooks Research Grant, I was able to travel to Bucharest, Romania, visit the archive of the AAFR and meet the Association’s director, who conducted the last interview with Clara Spitzer in 2012. Alongside viewing the photographs taken by Spitzer, I also searched the archive of the Fotografia magazine and viewed the photobooks and publications that Spitzer published during her career.