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Zbigniew Libera, Magdalena Sztandara
Ethnographers" Self-Depiction
in the Photographs from the Field.
The Example of Post-War Ethnology in Poland
Artistic Decision and Its Possible Consequences
In 2014, in the Ethnographic Museum in Cracow, an American curator and pho¬
tographer, Aaron Schumann, designed a rather unusual exhibition entitled “Folk.
Personal Ethnography”. Its unusual character concerned several issues and the most
important was a personal opportunity to explore his Polish origins. He focused
on “searching”, or rather “researching”, his own connections and relationships to
southern Poland via a collection of traditional customs, culture, materials, and ob¬
jects of the Ethnographic Museum and conversations with curators and archivists.
Therefore, leading his personal investigation, he was interested in “exploring the
museum’ collection itself” and also in answering the question of how “ethnography
itself is researched, preserved, and represented by the museum”.' It is worth noting
that in the process of investigating both his private story and the museum seen as
a space and idea of collecting, organizing, and giving meaning to objects from the
past, Schumann’s practices resemble those ethnographers in the field. It is particu¬
larly visible when he gradually starts to be interested in the smallest details and he
is drawn to people and their stories, artefacts, objects, and images collected in this
peculiar “field”. The outcome of his “searching” and “researching” was the exhibi¬
tion that incorporated the photographs, old storage boxes, catalogues, handwrit¬
ten notes, labels, and catalogue cards discovered in the ethnographic museum and
some original artefacts from his “Polish homeland”. One of the most interesting
of Schumann’s curatorial decisions was the use of black-and-white-photographs,
which might be perceived as snapshots taken during the fieldwork that documents
ethnographers and their “job”. Thus, the visitors could see the photographs from
the 1950s, sixties, and seventies that revealed the “behind the scenes” action of
ethnographic fieldwork. There are scenes, in which a researcher takes photos of
young women dressed in folk costumes against the wall of an old hut; in which
a researcher with great physical effort takes a photo of an old chapel; and in which
an ethnographer, sitting on the threshold of a hut, is “dressed up” as a traveller ex¬
ploring the “wild lands’—wearing a hat and a khaki vest, with a camera slung over
the shoulder—and recording in a notebook the story of an old lady who sits next to
! Fragments of personal correspondents of Aaron Schuman and Ethnographic Museum in Cracow
posted at Aaron Schuman’s website: aaron.schuman.com (last accessed on: November 11, 2015).