The glass negative was made by Romulus Vuia in 1912, in Ruși, Bretea Română, Hunedoara county, the ethnographic area of Hațeg Country.
In the foreground, there is a man dressed up in a long, white shirt, white wide underpants and a dark, straight coat with a lapel and side pockets.
In the background, there is a white masonry church, with a rectangular plan, shingled roof, in two waters, with a bell-tower partially integrated in the western facade of the building. The bell-tower, high and robust, has a wooden pavilion, square, open, with a parapet of fretted rhombus-shaped planks at the bottom, with carved pillars and semicircular arches, above which rises a high pyramidal helmet (spire), covered in shingles and completed with a cross, a symbol of Christianity.
In the churchyard, delimited by a wooden plank fence, horizontally arranged between round wooden and carved pillars, there are signs of a tomb, made of wood and five tall fir-trees, cleaned of branches to the top, looking like spears. The fir-tree, a tree with special meanings in the Romanian popular culture, considered a tree of life, with special features, accompanied man in all the referential moments of his life, from birth to marriage and death. The fir-tree was placed at the grave of unmarried young people, along with the cross, as a shield for the “unworldly” deceased in the afterlife. In the traditional village, in the burial rituals of the unmarried girls or boys, the Christmas tree played the role of husband or wife for the deceased one in the “other world”, thus repairing the incomplete earthly destiny of the prematurely dead person, restoring the community balance.
The negative, with inventory no. 2, is made on glass support, in the dry-gelatin technique, with dimensions of 9 cm x 12 cm.