Car cu fân din Bâlta, Runcu, Gorj, 1930

Iosif Berman · 1930

The hay goes down to the village with the cart pulled by the oxen. The image captured by the camera lens brings in front of the viewer a sequence from the village world: hay chariot in which lies grandfather and nephew is pulled on the village nuts by a pair of beautiful oxen. Two women, one young and another older go barefoot past the car. Everything is profiled in the summer sky sprinkled with clouds. The author of the photo is Iosif Berman (1892-1941), journalist and official photographer of the Royal Court. He accompanied Professor Gusti’s teams in almost all the village monography campaigns. One of his great qualities was the capture of the snapshots of the village life. On the initiative and under the direction of Professor Dimitrie Gusti from 29 June to 18 August 1930, a team of 60 monographers methodically and analytically researched all areas of his life - cosmological, biological, psychological, historical, economic, spiritual, political-administrative, at Runcu, Gorj, village (documentary attestation in 1486) situated at the foothills of the Vâcan Mountains in Sohodolului Gorge. Following this thorough investigation we defined the Romanian concepts about the theory and technique of sociological monography that in the coming years began to be known and applied also by researchers from other countries in Europe. Photography, cacherata on a cardboard sheet, with the humorous information: region, locality, title (in Romanian, French, German), date, photographer.