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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 universalism 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 researchers 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 arranged 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’ constructions’ (2003: 3-4). In fact, Noble and Hughes speak of the narratives that photographs contain, communicate and interact with, and of the intersection between photographs and their contexts. According to Marianna Michatowska (2012), assumption of researchers mentioned above can also refer to photographs that intentionally 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 photography 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 73
