Open AccessWorkers in an ethnographic archive: On the strategies of (re-)constructing the past
Author(s) -
Grażyna Ewa Karpińska
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
muzeológia a kultúrne dedičstvo
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.198
H-Index - 5
eISSN - 2453-9759
pISSN - 1339-2204
DOI - 10.46284/mkd.2022.10.1.6
Subject(s) - contest , exhibition , ethnography , meaning (existential) , visual arts , art , history , media studies , sociology , anthropology , political science , law , epistemology , philosophy
The article describes a collection of 9,000 photographs with captions – entries to a worker-oriented photographic contest – and the paths by which they came from private albums through the contest and museum exhibitions, until they found a place in the ethnographic archive of the Łódź University and in a digital repository. Having left household archives, they became a part of a public heritage rooted in, and dependent on, various historical contexts. Each procedure in some way determined the fortunes of the collection and constituted a choice that imparted a certain shape and meaning to the photographs.