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64 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 photographer, 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 objects 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 particularly 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 exhibition that incorporated the photographs, old storage boxes, catalogues, handwritten 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 exploring 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).
