Oldal 71 [71]
Ethnographers’ Self-Depiction in the Photographs from the Field. Post-War Ethnology in Poland
research did not really allow, and even ruled out, a long-term “art” of participant
observation. A short period of time for the interviews and the difficulty in reaching
the key informants in the field, who would have the time and willingness to pro¬
vide explanations, meant that the studies would be rather sketchy. The momentum
and scale prevailed over in the in-depth research and its quality was pointed out by
the participants of the camps in the following words:
The methods of obtaining the scientific information were sometimes far from
the ideals, plotted by the cabinet methodologists. Piecemeal campaigns, at¬
tempting to cover the greatest areas of post-war Polish ... gave a result of an in¬
complete picture of the culture, sometimes even chaotic (Dziegiel 1996: 235).
Rescuing was synonymous with the searching, day after day, for valuable prod¬
ucts of folk culture (respectively old), questioning, describing, sketching, and pho¬
tographing. However, apart from the photographs of artefacts and ethnic types,
there are photographs depicting ethnographers themselves. Records of days spent
in the “base” appear on photos less frequently (with the exception of those present¬
ing large trucks stuffed with the participants of the camp) giving place to the docu¬
mentation related to research tasks, being in the field and its exploration. Thus,
some of the photos prove—probably not quite intentionally—the ways of seeing,
being, moving, and behaving of researchers in the field. Those photographs could
be an interpretation of the moment of encounter in a particular cultural reality.
It is difficult to conceal the impression that the scientific and ethnographic
works from those times strongly reveal the research program and, moreover, that
the fieldwork was conducted under rigorous conditions. Thus, a fairly accurate
inventory, contact with objects of material culture in the field and as much infor¬
mation as possible obtained from the informants was assumed in the framework of
the research program.
A condition of the “proper” registration “fragments of the former provincial re¬
alities and the traditional colouration” (Dziegiel 1996: 223) was to find and conduct
interviews with aged women and men, the oldest people who could be found, those
“who remember”. Reaching the oldest interviewees was a necessary condition that is
confirmed also in photographs of the “scenery of interview” which include only the
old people while the young people are mainly spectators. Moving beyond the illus¬
trations of those pictures one could consider them as symbolic images ofa certain era.
Photography as a “Record of Culture”
When one thinks about archival ethnographic photographs from the field, one
might think also about a few types of images (Griffith 2002; Kubica 2013). The
first type is related to the nineteenth-century programs of anthropometric photo¬
graphs, which depicted subjects as representatives’ types. The second type consists
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