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OCR
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 provide 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, attempting to cover the greatest areas of post-war Polish ... gave a result of an incomplete picture of the culture, sometimes even chaotic (Dziegiel 1996: 235). Rescuing was synonymous with the searching, day after day, for valuable products of folk culture (respectively old), questioning, describing, sketching, and photographing. 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 presenting large trucks stuffed with the participants of the camp) giving place to the documentation 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 information 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 realities 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 illustrations 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 photographs, which depicted subjects as representatives’ types. The second type consists 69
