Artistic retouch

Costică Acsinte was born in 1897 in the small Romanian village of Perieţi and he was probably the only professional photographer in Romania during the First World War and in the next twenty years.

When he died in 1984, he had accumulated a collection of over 5,000 glass plate negatives depicting war scenes and people of all ages.

In the 80s the Romanian lawyer and photographer Cezar Popescu started a project to save and give visibility to Acsinte's photographs, without any institutional support, which consisted in cleaning every single negative.

In 2013 he started the digitization of the entire archive, which can be visited on the website Colectiacosticaacsinte.eu and on its Flickr account.

In 2014 the Australian artist and graphic designer Jane Long accidentally discovered the archive on Flickr and decided to retouch the old photos with Photoshop, coloring and entering surreal elements.

The result of this "digital restoration" is the series Dancing with Costică, in which every retouched picture is compared to Acsinte's original shots: "I wanted to bring those photos back to life" says Long "but most of all I wanted to give them a story. I wanted the public to recognize the subjects in the photos like real people".

The project will be on display until September 20th at the International Photo Biennale in Ballarat, Australia.