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This is Who We Were: In The 1970s

1978: Roumanian Immigrant & Photojournalist

Andrei Dancescu fled in 1970 from Communist Romania to New York City, where he became a prominent photojournalist.

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Life at Home

The only child of farming parents, Andrei Dancescu was born in 1950 in a small village outside of Bucharest, Romania.
Because Romania fell under the partial control of the Soviet Union after World War II, he grew up under Communist rule.
From when he was very young, Andrei enjoyed drawing and sketching.
Although it was difficult to purchase art supplies, his parents were supportive and helped him as much as they could.
Times were hard in 1950s Romania.
Soviet control was responsible for the exploitation of Romanian labor and resources.
The so-called “SovRom” agreements created joint ventures between Romanian and Soviet firms that benefited the USSR almost exclusively.
During this period, thousands of people were imprisoned by the government for political reasons.
In 1957, when Andrei was only seven years old, his aunt (his father's sister) and her husband were among those arrested and sent to a prison camp.
No one ever saw them again.
Although he was young at the time, the event had a strong effect on Andrei.
He soon began thinking about leaving the country once he got older.
The Soviet control of Romania ended in 1958, but Communism remained in place under the rule of the new leader Nicolae Ceausescu.
When he was 15, Andrei moved to Bucharest to attend an art institute and stayed with his mother's cousin, who lived in the city.
In addition to studying art and design, he also began playing the guitar.
He met a group of musicians his own age and formed a band; they became popular very quickly and wanted to play Beatles and Rolling Stones songs, but were afraid they would be considered rebellious in the eyes of the government.

Andrei Dancescu fled Communist Romania when he was 20-years-old.

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Andrei left Romania in 1970 and moved to Rome, Italy.

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People were still afraid of the government; like many, Andrei vividly remembered the abrupt arrest of thousands, including his aunt and uncle.
The band developed two distinct styles: traditional Romanian songs for public performances and British and American rock for underground clubs throughout the city.
Their favorite song to play was “Twist and Shout.”
Andrei loved playing foreign rock music even though he couldn't understand the lyrics; only later in life, after he had learned English, did he fully understand the depth of his poor pronunciations.
Andrei enjoyed city life more than his childhood in the country, but he still thought about leaving Romania; he wanted to be free to play the music he loved and not live in fear.
Andrei left Romania in 1970, at the age of 20, and moved to Rome, Italy.
He stayed with a family friend and enrolled in art school to sharpen his design skills; a music career seemed out of reach.
While he developed his portfolio, he worked as a cook in a restaurant.
There he met Samantha, the daughter of an American diplomat.
She grew up in Rome and New York, but her father's position allowed her to travel the world.
She had learned to speak Romanian from immigrant friends in Italy.
Samantha and Andrei became very close and were married in Rome in 1972.
Samantha's dream was to be a journalist in New York City; Andrei, too, secretly dreamed of living in the United States, but never thought it was possible, until he married Samantha.
In 1973, Andrei and Samantha moved to Astoria, Queens, in New York, based on her American citizenship.
When he first arrived in the United States, Andrei spoke practically no English; he and Samantha had always communicated in Romanian or Italian.
Even though she was a native speaker, the only English he knew was “good day” and “thank you.”

Life at Work

Job opportunities were scarce for Andrei Dancescu because of the language barrier; his first job was as a line cook in a diner in Manhattan.
Samantha got a job at The New York Times for very little money, and Andrei felt pressure to get a better job.
Toward that end, Samantha began teaching him English after work.
Each evening, they would read one complete page of The New York Times and work on the difficult parts.
When their first child, Dan, was born, Andrei felt a deep need for his family in Romania, but couldn't afford to visit.

Working as a line cook was Andrei's first job in America.

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His growing family motivated Andrei to work harder to find a better job.
He soon learned enough English to get a job as an assistant at a design firm.
He applied for a designer position, but because his portfolio was lost in the move from Italy, he had no work to show, and was hired as a guy-Friday.
His duties included running errands and answering the phone.
Still not confident with his English-speaking skills, he dreaded answering the phone.
One Friday afternoon, a client called to complain about not receiving a set of sketches.
The client described the missing sketches, and Andrei said that he would drop them off Monday morning.
Deciding to do the sketches himself, Andrei worked all weekend and delivered them Monday morning as promised.
When his boss learned what he had done, he was angry until the client called to say how much he liked Andrei's work.
Andrei was then promoted and asked to contribute design work for the firm, and given a substantial raise to $8,000 per year.
Shortly after, Andrei and Samantha took their son on vacation to Puerto Rico.
It was a special trip, because it was the first time since they had come to America that they could afford to go on vacation.
Andrei purchased a used Canon camera to document the trip, even though he had never seriously taken pictures before then.
He photographed beaches, nature and the people of San Juan.
When he got back to Queens and developed the pictures, he was so impressed and excited that he began considering a career in photography.
Andrei started taking his camera with him everywhere.
He walked all around the city, taking pictures of anything that caught his eye.

Andrei's sketches landed him a promotion.

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Taking his camera everywhere, Andrei quickly became a successful photojournalist.

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He began to read books on technique; his favorite was The Negative by Ansel Adams.
In 1978, Samantha got Andrei his first freelance assignment as a photojournalist covering a student protest for The New York Times.
He was paid $70 for the assignment.
More importantly, the Times liked his work, and his reputation grew.
His strategy was to accept as many assignments as he could, even from small newspapers and magazines, so that his name would be seen by more people.
Remembering the tough economic times in Romania caused him to be assertive in pursuing new assignments.
If he saw photographs in a newspaper or magazine that he thought were inferior to his own, he would call and tell the editor.
Andrei would sometimes even offer to take assignments for little or no pay in order to establish a relationship with a client.
His aggressiveness ruffled some feathers in the competitive world of professional photographers.
His strategy worked, however, and soon he was making as much as $300 an assignment.
He quickly became one of the most successful photojournalists in New York.
Andrei was determined to make sure his son had the opportunities he himself had missed growing up in Romania, and education was the first step.
As Andrei became more successful, feuds broke out between him and other photojournalists in the city.
Some felt that he was not fair in how he pursued assignments, while others understood that it was the nature of the business.
Andrei was deeply hurt by some of the things that were said about him and distanced himself more and more from the photojournalism community.

Life in the Community: Queens, New York

Andrei Dancescu's work always kept him very busy, so he didn't have much free time to spend with neighbors and friends.
He traveled on assignment as many as 20 weeks out of each year.
One place he never accepted assignments from was Romania, because there were things of which he did not want to be reminded.
He would visit his family every few years when he was on assignment at a neighboring country.
Due to his constant traveling, he became friends with the owner of the car service company that transported him to and from nearby LaGuardia Airport.
Because of the competitive, and sometimes hostile, nature of his work, Andrei was reluctant to socialize with his colleagues in the industry.
He developed a love of cooking over the years and was able to find traditional Romanian ingredients in his multi-ethnic Queens neighborhood.

New York City was full of inspiration for photographers.

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He enjoyed cooking for family and close friends.
Andrei avoided taking many pictures of friends and family, wanting to be seen with a personal, non-work side.
He also did not want to be viewed as one of the paparazzi.
One day, while walking around the city with his camera, he saw one of his childhood heroes, Mick Jagger.
When Jagger saw Andrei's camera, he immediately turned and started walking in the other direction.
The experience had a strong impact on Andrei, reminding him of the lack of personal freedom that existed in Romania when he was growing up.
He vowed never to pry into people's lives with his photography.

Romanian Immigration Timeline

1880s The first wave of Romanian immigration from what is now Romania began primarily from the agricultural provinces of Transylvania, Bukovina, and Banat, which were then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. 1900-1910 Thirty-seven thousand Romanians emigrated to the U.S. Overpopulation coupled with the steady consolidation of small, semi-feudal landholdings worked by peasants created a growing class of property-less laborers who sought opportunity in Europe and America.
At the height of emigration, around 94 percent of the emigrants were landless peasants and farmhands. Romanians who came to the U.S. nearly all found homes in the industrial Northeast and Midwest; New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio absorbed more than half of the total Romanian immigration. 1911-1914 Immigration continued at a rate of about 7,000 per year until World War I. 1924 U.S. immigration restrictions limited the number of Romanian entrants to 1,000 per year. 1930-1940 Immigration statistics showed a decrease of more than 30,000 Romanians in the U.S. 1970s Ninety percent of Romanian Americans continued to live in cities and tended to be employed as skilled factory workers and small-business entrepreneurs.

“Rumanians Are Seeking Contacts with Lost 4 Million in the Soviet,” by David Binder, The New York Times, October 10, 1976

The Rumanian Government has advised Western and independent powers with which it is friendly that it is seeking, for the first time in more than 30 years, to establish contacts with the four million ethnic Rumanians living in the Soviet Union.

American and Yugoslav officials said earlier this week that they had been told by high Rumanian authorities that this was the principal purpose of a visit last August by President Nicolae Ceausescu to the Soviet Republic of Moldavia, where most of the ethnic Rumanians live.

It was reported shortly after that visit that in talks with Leonid I. Brezhnev, the Soviet Communist Party chief, President Ceausescu had made some political concessions to the Soviet Union mainly in ideological areas. But the Rumanian authorities told American and Yugoslav officials that these concessions carried little real substance.

More important, they said, was to make clear during Mr. Ceausescu's visit that neither Rumania nor the Soviet Union had territorial designs across the long frontier between the two countries.

Specifically, Mr. Ceausescu told Mr. Brezhnev that Rumania did not dispute the post-World War II frontiers that accorded the Soviet Union control over the regions of Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia, both of which were part of Rumania before the war.

The Soviet Union forced Rumania to cede both regions in 1940, but Rumania, joining the Axis powers in 1941 when it was still a monarchy, sent armored forces into Bukovina and Bessarabia to recapture the lost territories. The Soviet Army reconquered the regions in 1944.

Since then the Soviet leadership has asserted that Soviet Moldavia, the former Bessarabia, was inhabited not by ethnic Rumanians but by Moldavians, and that Northern Bukovina was mainly inhabited by Ukrainians. Since 1965, Rumania has claimed that most of these people are Rumanians.

After the war the Soviet Union also deported more than a million Rumanians to eastern Siberia, where they form an ethnic unit to this day.

Citation Types

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Format

MLA 9th

"1978: Roumanian Immigrant & Photojournalist." This is Who We Were: In The 1970s,Salem Press, 2016. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GH1970_0023.

APA 7th

1978: Roumanian Immigrant & Photojournalist. This is Who We Were: In The 1970s,Salem Press, 2016. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GH1970_0023.

CMOS 17th