Stunning Photos Of Romania's Post-Communist Industrial Decay

Tamas Dezso/Courtesy of Robert Koch GalleryThe flooded village of Geamana, Romania.

From 1965 to 1989, Romania was home to one of the most repressive totalitarian regimes in history under Nicolae Ceausescu. During that time, Romania underwent a period of intense industrialization and urbanization under a program known as "systematization".

With a stated goal of doubling the number of Romanian cities by 1990, the program consisted of rural resettlement and the demolition of whole ways of life. What is left is a landscape of concrete apartment buildings and abandoned factories.

Since 2011, Hungarian photographer Tamas Dezso, who has photographed for Time and the New York Times, traveled to Romania to capture the crumbling structures left behind by the communist regime and the disappearing culture and people of Romania's villages. Because the majority of Romanians have fled the country looking for work, only a few people are left in the villages.

"I began photographing the scenes of a world irreversibly decaying, the transformation of a Balkan country surviving the region's hardest dictatorship," Dezso wrote for Lensa Magazine.

The collection, called "Epilogue," is currently on display at the Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco until November 2, 2013.