Photography and Cultural Heritage in the Age of Nationalisms: Europe’s Eastern Borderlands (1867–1945)
... The national narrative represents the collective experience and memory constructed by an ongoing "cultural industry". Photography serves as one of the main venues in the process of building and exchanging national knowledge (Manikowska, 2018;Moser 2019). Moreover, photographers play a central role in the creation of visual archives, that can become active cultural agents in the nation building project. ...
... The national narrative represents the collective experience and memory constructed by an ongoing "cultural industry". Photography serves as one of the main venues in the process of building and exchanging national knowledge (Manikowska, 2018;Moser 2019). Moreover, photographers play a central role in the creation of visual archives, that can become active cultural agents in the nation building project. ...
Culture is constructed, negotiated, managed, and shared by various ideological, political, and moral reasonings which manifest themselves tangibly and intangibly in public monuments, architecture, memorial sites, theaters, museums, orchestras, and heritage associations. The contributions to this volume explore the intersection of cultural heritage and nationality in societies that are characterized by national, multi-national, and post-national concepts. They question the roles that cultural heritage plays in its various contexts, and the ways in which ideology functions to produce it.
... Ці праці висвітлюють деталі біографії Кордиша, але мають переважно оглядовий або краєзнавчий характер. На їхньому тлі помітно вирізняється рівнем аналізу монографія Еви Маніковської, яку цікавила етнографічна спадщина цього фотографа (Manikowska 2019). Слід зазначити, що попри чималий дослідницький інтерес, певні обставини життя та діяльності Кордиша досі залишаються нерозкритими або потребують уточнення. ...
The paper explores the personality and artistic endeavours of Jozef Kordysz, a professional photographer of Polish-Ukrainian background who worked in Kamianets-Podilskyi and Kyiv during the late nineteenth century. Kordysz is renowned for his photographic expeditions in Podolia and Kyiv regions, as well as his trip to the zone of the Russo-Turkish war (1877-1878). Despite belonging to the Polish nobility and having close ties to the nationally conscious Ukrainian intelligentsia in Kyiv, Kordysz hardly identified himself with either Polish or Ukrainian national projects. His interest in ethnographic photography appears to be purely commercial in nature. Unfortunately, the most significant part of Kordysz’s photographic heritage is preserved in private collections and museums in Russia and has never been properly published. Due to the Russian aggression against Ukraine, the original materials are currently unavailable for Ukrainian scholars. Considering the exceptional value of these photographs for the history of Ukraine, the editorial board has decided to publish those photographs by Jozef Kordysz that are available on Russian Internet resources. The paper deals with the «Ethnographic Album of Little Russia» (1875), which includes pictures of Ukrainian peasants that Kordysz took during the 1860s in Kyiv region (the original album is preserved in the State Historical Museum in Moscow).
... Franzens-Museums 1898, 5). Type photography became a soaring commercial activity in wider society, due to the popularity of these images as collectors' items in the aristocratic and intellectual milieus (Manikowska 2019). The private production of illustrated postcards was legalized in 1885, and new and cheaper printing techniques introduced in 1897-1898 turned them into a true mass medium by the 1910s, when more than a million postcards circulated daily in the Austrian half of the empire alone (Bürgschwentner 2013, 101-102;Almasy and Tropper 2020, 10). ...
This article critically examines the prevalent nationalist interpretation of historical images featuring textiles from rural regions. In an effort to disentangle the threads of folk costumes, it proposes a conscious unlearning of the way we read images of rural material culture from the late 19th century. This period has entered historiography as a period of intensifying national movements and political use of rural culture, in particular in Central and Eastern Europe. So-called folk costumes have been viewed as a symbolic representation of the nation, whereas their broader social and economic role in the history of industrial society has been overshadowed. By bringing together the production, collection, and exhibition of rural material culture, this article reveals processes in industrial society that shaped the modern history of folk costumes. It draws on late-19th-century source material stemming from a network centered in Prague that promoted textiles from rural Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, and Galicia as ethno-commodities. Textiles were integrated into women’s industrial education and presented at events promoting national economy and the latest technological innovations. Thus, this article contributes to nationalism studies by discussing capitalism and industrialism and seeks to further scrutinize the history of nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe.
Alfred Silkiewicz’s photographs from the collection of Karol Lanckoroński taken during Archduke Rudolph’s visit to Ternopil as an example of source materials for researching the history of Galicia and its inhabitants In 1929 Karol Lanckoroński (1848–1933) donated his collection of scientific photographs to the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among the photographs of works of art and archeological relics in that collection we can also find prints of ethnographic nature, including photographs by Alfred Silkiewicz, a photographer with connections in Ternopil. On 6 July 1887 the heir to the throne Archduke Rudolph visited Ternopil and saw an ethnographic exhibition designed specially for his visit in the municipal garden. The central figures of the exhibition were residents of minor towns of Eastern Galicia brought to Ternopil, dressed in regional costumes. The text focuses on the circumstances of taking those photographs and on their significance as a source for researching the history of Galicia and its residents.
The article analyzes the relationship between citizenship of peasants and photography in the Polish lands in the nineteenth century, using the perspective of potential history (A. A. Azoulay). The purpose of the article is twofold. The first step is to show how photography supported the process of separating the upper classes from the peasants and prevented villagers from being thought of as (present and future) citizens. The second one demonstrates various attempts to “re-frame” the existing reality, i.e. to reunite in one photographic frame what had previously been separated, which was tantamount to imagining a different social order, an order based on cocitizenship. The analyzed material includes mainly photographs and, as contextual sources, paintings from the Kingdom of Poland and Galicia.
While historians of Southeast Europe have recently increasingly turned to photographs as primary sources, this article reads a late 19th century photographic album not as an (objective) representation of a city, but as a carefully constructed visual narrative with afterlives of its own. The album, created upon the annexation of the city of Niš from the Ottoman Empire, produces multiple temporalities: the “recurring” and “timeless” national authenticity of the village, shown through costumes and church ruins, is contrasted with the images of the city, which the album constitutes as “old” and photographs as “future ruins.” The latter serves to establish a temporal break between the Ottoman past and the pending Serbian modernization project. Today, the album embodies two distinct afterlives. First, the Ottoman city—and the Empire itself—which the album proclaims “dead,” continues to live only as an object of photography. Second, the album today represents an afterlife of the foundational ideologies and images of post-Ottoman nation-making in and beyond Serbia. The two afterlives are not without contradiction: even though it is used to proclaim the empire “dead,” the album represents an ambivalent material afterlife of the empire in the present (Walton, 2019), while the ambivalence of photography as a medium itself opens avenues for readings beyond the prescribed.
Kolej Lwowsko-Czerniowiecka otwarta została w 1866 r., a najważniejsze elementy jej infrastruktury, takie jak dworce i mosty, oraz tabor zostały udokumentowane w albumie fotograficznym, który powstał najprawdopodobniej na zamówienie dyrekcji Kolei na krótko po otwarciu linii, zapewne w 1867 r. Egzemplarze albumu w różnym stopniu kompletności zachowały się w kilku kolekcjach europejskich i amerykańskich. Autorem zdjęć jest Adolf Schoon von Corbitzthal (1830–1904), żołnierz armii austriackieji urzędnik kolejowy, zatrudniony na Kolei Lwowsko-Czerniowieckiej w latach 1866–1871. Album jest jednym z licznych zespołów zdjęć o tej tematyce, które powstały w drugiej połowie XIX w. głównie na zlecenie spółek budujących nowe linie i służyły przede wszystkim celom reprezentacyjnym.
The University of Oxford Siberian expedition (1914–1915) led by Maria Czaplicka brought to the United Kingdom knowledge and objects from the little‐known Yenise region in Siberia. The photographs taken during this expedition exemplify the uncertain role of photography in anthropology at this time and speak of the possibilities afforded by the abundance of the medium. Comparing the photographic outputs of the expedition to those of the first British generation of field‐working ethnographers and Arctic explorers, this article examines early ethnographic photography as a form of translation aimed at diverse audiences.
The Finnish wartime landscape was altered by Nazi troops who were stationed there during World War Two. This paper examines wartime sceneries through Finnish Army Information Company's photographs from the period of the war known in Finland as the Continuation War (1941-1944). The images reveal a completely different side to the Nazi co-belligerence to what is traditionally acknowledged in Finland. I discuss the ways the Nazi troops altered the Finnish landscape, adding `German-ness´ to their surroundings and more specifically, how Nazi ideology manifested in the northern Finnish landscapes. The Finns have been completely oblivious to the symbolic messages the Nazis crafted in their surroundings. Photographs as haunting representation addresses in this paper both the difficult memory of German presence that frames these pictures and the specific potency of these photographic encounters. Haunting as a theory deals with the evocative ways an image can convey information about the past.
The article deals with the early history of photographic industry in Kyiv as a complex cultural phenomenon. Special attention is focused on the portrait photography as a ‘technology of memory’. It involves methods of social history of art, prosopography and visual anthropology. The study is based on the wide scope of archival documents, including the correspondence of publishing facilities inspector, who supervised the photographic activity in Kyiv from 1888 to 1909. By the early 20th century, making, collecting, displaying and exchanging the photographic portraits became an important memorial practice for townspeople throughout the world. In the pre-WWI Kyiv dozens of ateliers produced photographic portraits in large quantities. While the urbanization and economic growth boosted migration activity and washed out traditional family and neighborhood networks, the photography provided an instrument for maintaining emotional connections between people. The author emphasizes the role of a professional photographer who acted as a maker of ‘memory artifacts’ for individuals and families and, therefore, established aesthetic standards for their private visual archives. It is stated that the professional photography played a noticeable role in modernization and westernization of Kyiv. With its relatively low barrier to entry, it provided a professionalization opportunity for women, representatives of the lower social classes or discriminated ethnic groups (such as Poles after the January Insurrection, and Jews). While working in a competitive environment, photographers had to adopt new technologies, improve business processes and increase their own educational level. At the same time, their artistic freedom was rather limited. The style of photographic portrait was inherited from the Eighteen and Nineteen-century academic art, so it is usually hard to distinguish photographic portraits made in Kyiv or in any other European city of that period. Body language of models, their clothing and personal adornments as well as studio decorations and accessories aimed to construct the image of successful individuals, faithful friends, closely tied family members with their own strictly defined social roles etc. The old-fashioned style of the early twentieth century portraiture shaped the visual aesthetics of photographic portrait that was noticeable enough even several decades later.
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