Costică Acsinte Archive needs your support
Costică Acsinte (1897–1984) was a one of Romania’s most prolific war photographers. After he was discharged in 1920, he opened a photographic studio in the southern side of Romania, in the small but, as you will see, vibrant town of Slobozia. During the rest of his life, he took more than 5.000 photographs that were donated to the Ialomița County Museum by his family. According to Romanian law, the entirety of his work is now public domain.
“My name is Cezar Popescu. First of all, I’m a photographer too. Out of passion for this art and considering the huge historical value, I decided to digitize all of Mr. Acsinte’s work, financing the beginning of this initiative out of my own pocket. I have scanned around 1.500 glass plates by now out of a total of 5.000 and counting.
However, there’s only so much I can achieve by myself. I managed to cover all the digitization costs by myself, around 2.000€ to be more precise (here you can take a look at the expenses). Talk about putting my money where my passion lies.
The problem arises when it comes to the photographic glass plates. They need special conditions to be properly archived and stored in order to preserve their increasing historical value. That’s where you come in.”
Until now, Mr. Acsinte’s work has been viewed by over 4 million people as part of the Flickr the Commons program. Also, the story of this remarkable man’s life has been featured in TIME, Reuters, PetaPixel, Chicago Tribune and more.
Support the project on Indiegogo, follow the updates on colectiacosticaacsinte.eu, Facebook or Twitter.
[…] Costic? Acsinte’s legacy consists in about 5000 film negatives on glass plates, a smaller number of sheet film negatives and an unknown number of photographic prints. Most of the prints bear the stamp of the photography studio “Foto Splendid Acsinte” on the back. 2013 saw the initiation of a project for digitizing this vast collection of moments from the past, some of the works being in an advanced state of degradation. Currently the digital version of Costic? Acsinte’s works is under public domain and the progress of the digitalization project can be traced on the project’s website: http://colectiacosticaacsinte.eu/ […]