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Ethnographers’ Self-Depiction in the Photographs from the Field. Post-War Ethnology in Poland
themselves. Indeed, posing is an act of image creation, an act in which the subject
attempts to project a particular self-image. Roland Barthes has also written about
“performing our identity” in the moment of the pose:
I constitute myself in the process of “posing”. ... In front of the lens, I am at the
same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one
the photographer thinks I am (Barthes 1993: 156).
One can assume that those photographic images are inscribed to a certain uni¬
versalism and conventionalism of presentations. Researchers in front of the camera,
by using their bodies, poses, props, and arrangement of background, reproduce all
the essential elements of the model-based ideas about themselves. Following such
perspective one may assume that there is a convergence in presenting the research¬
ers on the photographs and the “ethnographic types”. There is the “theatralization”
of the background, compositions, and poses, and the ethnographers—just as their
informants—are imagined according to their own and someone else’s imagination.
Photographs that Have Some “Story to Tell”
As I mentioned before the collection of photographs from the fieldwork may be ar¬
ranged in narration with some “story to tell”. What does it mean that a photograph
can be regarded as a text, or rather—as a photo-text? In the introduction to their
book Phototextualities: Intersection of Photography and Narrative, Andrea Noble and
Alex Hughes propose not to limit the reading of photography to preexisting verbal
paradigms but rather to pay attention to “particularized forms of signification that
the photographs evince; to the gamut of genres and modes of narrative practice
with which photo-images intersect, as they work within ‘photonarrative’ construc¬
tions’ (2003: 3-4). In fact, Noble and Hughes speak of the narratives that photo¬
graphs contain, communicate and interact with, and of the intersection between
photographs and their contexts. According to Marianna Michatowska (2012), as¬
sumption of researchers mentioned above can also refer to photographs that inten¬
tionally do not have a classical narrative form. These are the photographs that are
either independent or belong to a series of images that reveal the ability of pho¬
tography to replace language in narrative endeavours. Narrative approach enables
us to identify the meanings of a specific image and to deconstruct the ideological
background, in which a photograph is enmeshed. Therefore the meanings are not
so much present én the images but rather, following Mieke Bal theory of narratology
(2007), they surround the images.
In this context it would also be useful to recall the proposition of Terence
Wright (2008), who mentioned three kinds of social practices connected with
photography: looking “through”, looking “on”, and looking “behind” the picture.
The first allows us to treat the image as a window or keyhole through which we can
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