The photographs of Vasilii Lefter (1943–1982) were never published while he lived. Made in and around Chișinău, the capital of Soviet Moldavia, they show villagers at weddings, in gardens, in the forest and in community rooms; family members posed as couples; babies, portable radios and other shared props passed from sitter to sitter. Lefter was self-taught, worked as a freelance graphic designer—producing posters and stencils for regional kolkhozes after leaving a desk job at the Ministry of Building, where he had been employed since 1970—and developed his black-and-white small-format film at home, in his bathroom, spending a good part of his modest income on photography. When his daughter, the artist Tatiana Fiodorova (born 1976), found the material, the boxed images had been gathering dust for twenty-five years on the balcony of her parents’ apartment.
Once upon a time in Moldavia, published by Hartmann Books in 2018 as part of the lost&found series devoted to analogue photographs and picture archives, gathers 49 images across 48 pages. The pictures appear unretouched, so the marks of production, handling and storage remain visible, from the emulsion outward. The booklet’s small dimensions—14.8 × 21 cm—and its issue in a cellophane bag suit the intimacy of the material and its origins in a domestic darkroom rather than an editorial office. Lefter’s eye is unhurried and close to the people in front of him; the recurring portable radios and the near-identical clothing record both the pleasures available to his sitters and the uniformity of Communist fashion.
The book was edited by Beate Kemfert and Markus Hartmann, with graphic design by Antonia Grösschen, and appears in German and English. Because Lefter’s work was not shown or published in his lifetime, its first international presentation came decades after his death; the publisher notes that this volume accompanied that exhibition. The interest for a reader lies less in scarcity talk than in what the sequence allows: an archive seen whole, its domestic settings and modest props given the coherence of a body of work. Read alongside its companion titles in the series, it makes a quiet argument for looking closely at photographs that were never meant for the market.
