Bucharest, Nov 18 /Agerpres/ – “The 1989 Retrospective” exhibition, which presents, month by month, the key moments and the atmosphere of a period of profound transformation, was opened on Monday at the Romanian Academy Library.

Images, news articles and documents that chronologically capture the essential moments of 1989 are presented on 12 panels. The exhibition is organized by the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archive (CNSAS), in partnership with AGERPRES National News Agency.

“Photography is the most faithful element of history, it contains neither subjectivity, nor, somehow, the metaphor of a story, which a piece of news can contain, at a given moment,” said the AGERPRES Director General Claudia Nicolae, at the opening.

She recalled that AGERPRES holds the largest and oldest historical archive.

“Let us not believe that, as happened in other institutions, there wasn’t any attempt to take over the archive, especially the AGERPRES photographic archive, but my colleagues managed to preserve it. This is why, today, we find the largest and oldest historical archive in the institution. We’re talking about four and a half million photographs – that’s until 2005, which is the physical archive. Since 2005, the digital archive came in and there is another archiving process. The physical archive contains four and a half million photos, and the communist period is very extensive, because the regime of that time wanted to have an AGERPRES photojournalist every minute. Every moment of that period is in the AGERPRES archive and I am glad that under such projects we manage to show it to the public. After all, that is the agency’s mission, to show and illustrate those moments through images. They are the clearest and the most expressive and they are not few,” Claudia Nicolae further explained.