The unmade photo by Dorel Găină

Illustration by: Lucia Mărneanu

The unmade photo by:
Octav Ganea

Somewhere in Romania

A person, man or woman, you cannot tell and it’s not really relevant, is tearing down the last outside loo of a Romanian school, in the courtyard of a recently renovated establishment that has been updated to European standards. On the roof of the school there is an antenna, barely visible, which connects the school in this isolated settlement to online, modern systems of education. And over the new fence, on the sidewalk of the revamped county road, updated with draining system and made of the best materials, there are a few dozen youngsters, who recently returned to their home country to work alongside their relatives instead of abroad.

This is the photo I could never take.

About Octav Ganea

Partner of Inquam Photos, coordinator of a team of Inquam photojournalists and constantly working in the field over the past 14 years, Octav started to take photos for the daily newspaper called Gandul, while in his last year of studying arts at the University of Bucharest. He first started working for a press agency when he got a job at Mediafax Footo, which he left in 2015 in order to join Ovidiu Micsik, the founder of Inquam Photos. It is here where he started, along with being a photojournalist, to fight an everlasting battle against those who do not respect copyrights and intellectual property. He often paraphrases a song you frequently hear on soccer stadiums or while participating in protests: “There’s no worse job than being an agency photographer,” but he doesn’t really mean it because he is very satisfied that he doesn’t have to do the same thing every day.