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Ethnographers’ Self-Depiction in the Photographs from the Field. Post-War Ethnology in Poland him. These scenes are not the scenes that we usually see or that as anthropologists we show to others after returning from an ethnographic exploration. Neither do they appear in the books or in the articles written by the ethnographers. Browsing through the archives of the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology in Cracow (formerly the Chair of Ethnography of South Slavs), one might find such small-format black-and-white photos, not of the best technical quality with hard-to-read handwritten notes on the back, hidden in small storage boxes. Although many years have passed since they were taken (most of them date from the middle of the last century) their status of being a source of knowledge and archival material was complex and not entirely clear.? Even now their cataloguing has become somewhat confusing. ‘The first recognition may therefore be that those photographs showing ethnographers in the field reveal something that should be invisible: researcher’s scientific approach and work, specific experience being with/encountering the Others, and finally voyeurism and subsequent stages of the research investigation. For a long time the ethnographers work in the field was based on myth and an assumption that there was no ethnographer in the field, in the sense of the lack of impact on the community. Anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes claims that this kind of perception was based on the illusion that an ethnographer is “an invisible and permeable screen through which pure data, facts, could be objectively filtered and recorded” (Scheper-Hughes 1992: 23). The “unclear” procedures in the process of acquiring anthropological knowledge by an ethnographer from the beginning of fieldwork to the writing of a scientific text continues to be “unspoken” even today (cf. Buliñski & Kairski 2013). In his artistic action, Schumann attempts to speak about the “unspoken”, by displaying such photographs in the framework of the project entitled “Folk. Personal Ethnography”. It means that somehow he locates them in the sphere of commemorative or private photography. His curatorial decision may also be useful for a visual anthropologist nowadays who attempts to analyse photographic materials created by ethnographers in the field. The clue may be that the photographs, certainly those presenting a group of ethnographers against the truck transporting them in the field everyday but also the ones that present the ethnographers during their fieldwork (drawing, taking photos, interviewing local people), may have at the same time the status of private and public photography. On the one hand, they could be created as a testimony of being in the field, on the other hand, as a private memorial. These photographic presentations seem to operate at the junction of public and private collections and might be related to the issue of the social ? For example, in a report about the archive of the Chair of Ethnography of South Slavs from the 1965 by Barbara Olszowy, illustration material was included only in one section and concerned merely material culture. The snapshots depicting researchers in the field are not mentioned in the volume at all (see Olszowy 1965). 65
