Object Collections: Modern Encounters with Ethnographic Photography in Britain and the Balkans

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When I lastly encounter Durham’s collections on the British Museum, following months of analysis on-line, I’m shocked. I’m introduced neither with disordered packing containers nor negatives, however photographic albums of top of the range prints, every saved in a plastic pocket, and marked with reference numbers and corresponding notes. The huge quantity of visible materials—each precise and potential—is lowered down to those 5, comparatively trendy, inexperienced albums.²⁰ The activity is seemingly easy—even perhaps ‘the work of a volunteer’—to scan and add the prints on-line with their written descriptions, in relation to the 2 object numbers, their corresponding negatives, and any duplicates within the assortment. (The Museum is working in direction of full digitisation of its assortment within the subsequent 4 years.)

Yet there’s one thing extra to those pictures, not like these I’ve beforehand seen. They are remarkably sharp, in distinction to the tender focus of Durham’s gaze within the pictures obtainable on-line. Some thus resist the temporal othering of the pictured topics and practices, inserting them firmly within the current second. Others are so sharp as to appear stranger than actuality, not representing actual folks, however reasonably teams taking part in dress-up in a rural village, recreated as a set.

These pictures appear to be greater than aide-mémoires; many could possibly be mistaken for monochromatic mid-century photographic artworks. Durham, a watercolour painter reasonably than photographer by training, was clearly expert with the lens, displaying a transparent command of sunshine and shadow. These a whole lot comprise a outstanding archive; much more so, contemplating seemingly solely the ‘successful’ photographs had been developed and printed. Some have a slight blur, reflecting the movement of life. Others bear a darkish smudge, obscuring a part of the scene. In fewer nonetheless, the figures have been partially developed, or solarised, and seem nearly as ghosts. It is these photographs that seduce inventive and artistic interpretation, within the gaze of the up to date viewer.

In her in depth written accounts, Durham isn’t identified to have expressed a lot curiosity or intent for her photographic apply. In the guide Twenty Years of Balkan Tangle (1920), Durham writes about her first go to to Shkodër and Kosovo in 1901, which she started after getting an entry allow from the Ottoman authorities. Her first contacts and buddies had been the painters Kolë Idromeno and Ndoc Martini, and the aforementioned photographer, Marubi.²¹ Yet nothing is recorded within the guide of those encounters, or their influence, if any, on her image-making.

A recent encounter on this archive shouldn’t be ‘guided by the imperial desire to unearth unknown ‘hidden’ moments,’ as Azoulay warns, a danger of reifying the colonial dynamic of the museum or establishment.²² Following Azoulay, although, it’s attainable to interact with archival supplies together with pictures in methods which open dialog about their historic presents, reasonably than limiting their that means to a decided, singular, previous. Durham’s pictures, nevertheless, are presently organised by place and time, limiting their many narratives to a single, chronological one, whose topic is extra Durham because the photographer, reasonably than the folks and locations depicted.

Durham actively used images inside her political work, evidenced by the presence of her photographs in her writing for newspapers and journals in Britain. Often privileged are her representational portraits, comparatively few in quantity; the nonetheless photographs which protect, and lock their topics in time and kind. Following Durham’s unique captions, a complete ‘Cultural Group’ within the RAI database is dedicated to ‘Gypsies,’ a derogatory time period then generally used to check with Roma; one other, to Old Turkish Bridges. Next to those photographs, Durham provides her discipline notes:

Out door forge at Podgoritza [Podgorica]; asserted by Montenegrins to be dwelling of the ancestor of the Karageorge [Karadjordje] dynasty, who was a “black gypsy”; this the Karageorgevitches deny, however it’s not inconceivable. [400_001985/MS-41-1-0009]

The notion of ‘primitivism’ is most express in her writing, which seemingly contradicts the empathy and respect afforded in her many pictures. On donation of her assortment to the RAI in direction of the top of her life, she remarked her hope that, ‘in the future, they may be of interest as a record of the very primitive conditions in East Europe at the beginning of the 20th century.’

Yet the practices Durham captures converse to extra advanced, plural methods of being. Gender ambiguity is a frequent topic of Durham’s gaze; certainly one of her greatest represented pictures at the moment is that of an (unnamed) Albanian sworn virgin, introduced most just lately as a part of Beyond the Binary: Gender, Sexuality, Power on the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford (2021–2022). In High Albania, Durham explains the best way by which, by means of swearing virginity, an Albanian girl may:

escape the husband to whom she [had] been bought’, and achieve sure rights afforded to males together with self-determination of costume, buying and selling, and the carrying of arms. She continues that the apply was additionally undertaken ‘among the many Moslem [Muslim] in addition to the Christian tribes. But I met no examples. I heard of 1 who had served within the Turkish military.²³

Despite her gender, Durham—who was guided by means of her travels solely by males, save for her very first vacation—was clearly indifferent from the ladies whose lives and practices appeared of better curiosity to her work. In Blood Is thicker than Water (n.d.), she notes that ‘in the eyes of the [unsophisticated] tribeswoman I ranked as a male—as a junak (warrior).’²⁴ Being thought of as such was seemingly a supply of pleasure for Durham.²⁵ At instances, her standing even proves a degree of amusement to her:

No girl was allowed to eat with me in a tribesman’s dwelling. I ate with the lads, however as that they had to attract the road someplace, they might typically assist my horse-boy first.²⁶

Durham was actually conscious of the entry her standing—as a traveller and photographer—supplied. In High Albania, she proudly remarks that she was handled with ‘great honour and classed with the buck-herd’. Simultaneously, her gender and ambiguous standing enabled her distinctive entry. ‘They also seemed to have an idea that as I am unmarried I belonged to the sworn virgin class and was fit to be associated with.’ Her photographs, nevertheless, mirror how this entry was mediated by the lads who knowledgeable, if not decided, her itineraries.²⁷ It is notable that only a few names are recorded with Durham’s photographs. Just sixty-four—or 4 %—of the picture information on the RAI are related to a reputation and, the place they’re, they’re typically folks in positions of energy, notably spiritual authority, and males.²⁸ Only the extra privileged girls, as evidenced by their costume, are photographed in frontal, staged portraits, reminiscent of Ike Pejovic, or Stojana [Nikoleva], ‘the baker’s spouse’, each in Montenegro. Many others seem in homogenised teams, on the corners of the picture, or the sides of public locations. Durham was a copious, and deliberate, author. These unnamed topics stand as testomony to the restricted diploma to which she personally engaged with those that populate nearly all of her photographs.

Durham didn’t, as so typically her counterpart males, search out or search to show girls. Consider the photographs of veiled Albanian girls made by William Le Queux, and alluded to in his textual content, An Observer within the Near East (1907). The title implies the writer”s indifferent perspective and gaze, which is enacted once more upon the reader, within the absence of the {photograph} within the printed textual content. In Shkodër, he describes the ‘ghostly and mysterious” women he sees ‘shuffling’ by means of the streets, and arranges with an Albanian man to view, and {photograph}, his spouse and sister-in-law with out their veils.²⁹

Andrew Neil Hammond responds to Le Queux’s journey writing, of the ‘spectacle’ of unveiling, as a type of ‘mastery’.³⁰ If this passage does, as Hammond suggests, symbolize the up to date and ‘unwavering confidence in language,’ then the pictures of our inquiry grow to be all of the extra vital, as visible proofs of other realities.

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Photography isn’t an goal medium, however provides methods of trying and seeing that emerge out of subjective expertise. Margaret Masson Hardie Hasluck (1885-1948), a youthful up to date of Durham’s, arrived within the Balkans by a distinct route. Hasluck studied on the University of Aberdeen earlier than Cambridge, and, as a girl ‘without independent means,’ was sponsored by Jane Harrison to pursue additional research on the British School at Athens. Here, she met and married its assistant director, Frederick Hasluck, and supported his work. Hasluck’s ethnographic fieldwork formally started following her husband’s loss of life in 1920, although collectively that they had travelled extensively within the area throughout World War I, together with his work in British counter-intelligence and archaeological pursuits.³¹ A travelling fellowship from her alma mater in Scotland enabled her to embed herself within the area, constructing her own residence in Albania the place she lived from 1923 till the beginning of World War II.

Like Durham, Hasluck was most revered for her written analysis and publications, which included the primary English-Albanian language reader. Both of their achievements are sometimes framed as all of the extra outstanding as a consequence of their ‘unconventional’ journeys, by way of inventive (Durham) and classical (Hasluck) educational research, and immersion within the discipline, reasonably than the emergent educational discipline of social anthropology.³² In a letter to Beatrice Blackwood, curator on the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, Durham wrote:

The ridiculous factor about me is that, till I used to be requested to learn a paper on the Anthrop [RAI] I had hardly heard of anthropology, not to mention learn something about it.³³

This comment, from the primary girl Vice President of the RAI, could possibly be learn as coy. Durham’s strategies actually differed to Hasluck’s—extra ‘itinerant’, she travelled between communities, reasonably than staying with anyone for an extended interval, establishing grounds for each comparability and generalisation.³⁴ Both of their approaches to image-making, however, mirror the visible and cultural considerations of each anthropology and ethnography.³⁵ This begs a query about how the ethnographer makes use of images to seize a ‘race’ or, right here, ‘tribe.’ Looking by means of the digicam—or on the picture—with an ethnographic lens, what can we see?

Hasluck’s heat, sepia-toned, pale—nostalgic—photographs don’t share the identical aesthetic high quality of these made by Durham. They are higher saved, however equally displaced from her object collections in Scotland at University College London, with a collection of 500 obtainable to the general public of their Digital Collections on-line. The relaxation can be found for session, topic to the same old circumstances of entry to Archives and Manuscripts materials, after the completion of a ‘Reader’s Undertaking,’ limiting their entry to these enterprise educational—and certain, anthropological—analysis.³⁶ Moving past these specific establishments, we would think about the photographs changed along with these of different girls reminiscent of Vera Holme and Evelina Haverfield, often called Jack and Eve respectively, who served within the Scottish Women’s Hospitals in Serbia throughout World War I, and whose archives stay at The Women’s Library presently housed on the London School of Economics.³⁷

In these instances, their object collections of ‘crafts’—typically deemed the area of girls, or girls’s work—are greatest identified, cared for, and represented in establishments, greater than their potential contributions to the sector of images. This is to say that the person is displaced even inside the establishment, their practices and collections separated out by division or class.

As with separating negatives and prints, this course of additional detaches the photographs from their context. It additionally means that the anthropologist’s method to images is instrumental, one that doesn’t worth images independently, however solely in relation to the item. As June Hill, a curator and researcher of textiles, suggests of the Durham assortment:

The in depth background materials drastically enhances the fabric itself, and places the textiles of their social context. Without such context, specimens can simply grow to be mere curios – examples of vintage work.³⁸

In this fashion, it’s clear how images can perform as a part of the logic of assortment, as each possession and categorisation, reasonably than as a way of resisting it.³⁹ Azoulay’s critique of the colonial dynamics inherent in museums and establishments stays in focus.

The discovery that Durham would have been my neighbour in London, the place I’m presently primarily based, prompts consideration of my very own place, as a subjective and diasporic researcher, in a diasporic archive. My shut trying and a focus to element grow to be interventions, and gestures of care in direction of that which, for thus lengthy, has been uncared for. Simultaneously, I discover the presence of the phrase ‘beloved’ within the accounts I learn.

What does it imply that these foreigners would possibly journey extra freely, would possibly know, and expertise hospitality as I could by no means, because of my very own specific background? What does it imply to be between gazes, to be born, to reside, and to work in a single place, to see gaze projected? Fundamentally, these are questions of what it means to narrate to a spot that’s so othered, so exoticised, and cared for less than when media and public gaze is shifted. Before Traditional jewelry and costume from the Balkans, essentially the most substantial exhibitions of Balkan artwork and textiles had taken place within the Nineteen Forties, and Nineties, throughout the context of wars.⁴⁰

I contemplate the presence of Palestinian textile exhibitions in Britain at the moment.

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At this juncture, it’s crucial to contemplate these views in dialog with extra up to date anthropologists within the area. Vera Stein Erlich (1897-1980) was born in Zagreb, a metropolis then within the south of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As a person of Croatian and Jewish heritage, she could also be assumed to carry a specific sensibility to her apply. Nevertheless, it was her pursuit of training elsewhere—first in psychology, in Vienna and Berlin—that sharpened her ethnographic method to Yugoslavia, a spot which she described as concurrently ‘East and West, traditional and modern…backward and progressive…’⁴¹

Whilst acknowledging the co-existence of each ‘primeval and modern conditions of life’ throughout the area, it was the previous that captured her consideration and focus. Her survey of Muslim, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox communities within the Nineteen Forties grew to become, as she later noticed, ‘a film of forms of life that were soon to disappear’, with the approaching of civil battle and socialist revolution, transformations typically marginalised throughout the singular illustration of World War II in Europe. This analysis manifested within the formative textual content Porodica u transformaciji — Studija u tri stotine jugoslavenskih sela (1964), revealed in English as Family in Transition: A research of 300 Yugoslav villages (1966), essentially the most in depth anthropological evaluation of pre-war Yugoslavia. The British Library in London holds a duplicate of the 1966 translation, and a second, enlarged version, revealed in 1971. So too does the British Museum, its copy discharged from and donated by the RAI.

Of the 32 pictures within the textual content, solely 4 had been seemingly taken by Erlich herself—Bosnian Peasants within the Field (4), Man from Bosnia (5), Potter within the Lika space, Croatia (7), and Croatian Women (11). Even that is unsure, a strategy of deduction from the acknowledgements, which quantity the copyrighted pictures taken by two internationally famend artwork photographers—and males—primarily based in Zagreb, Tošo Dabac (1907-1970) and Mladen Grčević (1918-2012).⁴²

Erlich’s alternative of photographers, and images, was extra seemingly knowledgeable by availability, reasonably than inventive curiosity. Her decisions had been, however, outstanding. Grčević contributed to the regional improvement of the apply, by means of his personal apply, texts together with Art Photography in Croatia 1891–1940. The Phenomenon of the Zagreb School (1955), and public, crucial responses to exhibitions reminiscent of The Family of Man (1955-1958). Grčević’s exhibition in Zagreb in May 1944 was the one solo exhibition held within the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), established as a satellite tv for pc of the Third Reich within the spring of 1941. Following the top of the wars in Yugoslavia, in 1948, he participated in a images exhibition in Zagreb with others together with Tošo Dabac and Marijan Szabo, the one contributors that had been additionally members of the principle artwork affiliation, the Croatian Association of Fine Artists (ULUH).⁴³

Dabac labored on completely different publications all through his profession, together with for overseas information companies, and as a translator and press officer for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s subsidiary in Zagreb. From his first exhibition in Ivanec in 1933, he was thought of a part of a group that contributed to the event of artwork images within the area, partially by means of the publication of Galerija, an area language version of the European artwork images journal Die Galerie.⁴⁴

Unlike different photographers and artists of his technology, Dabac’s apply was deeply related to the area. Apart from a serious journey to the Mediterranean in 1932, he didn’t work exterior of Yugoslavia.⁴⁵ He stays greatest identified for his black-and-white pictures of Zagreb avenue life in the course of the Great Depression of the Nineteen Thirties, and for his month of pictures and diary entries from Istria, which captured the area’s ‘post-war’ financial circumstances, in 1945.

On a single web page in Family in Transition—109—bears three pictures, taken by the three photographers, of markets in Bosnia, Croatia, and Montenegro. Save for the variations in costume, they could possibly be mistaken for various views on a similar scene, certainly, the work of the identical photographer. To problem disciplinary boundaries, then, what makes Grčević and Dabac’s tasks extra photographic or inventive, the place Erlich, Hasluck, and Durham’s are social and anthropological?

For Erlich, it’s clear that the picture is solely illustrative of her textual content— the written phrase, like the item within the assortment, has primacy. The pictures are positioned alongside tables, graphs, and charts, accounting the ‘loyalty of husband to sister and wife’ by quantity, illustrating the extent to which ‘parents beat children much.’ No additional context or clarification is obtainable concerning the pictures, save for a caption, just a few phrases which reduces the themes and sitters to a nationwide sort.

‘About the Pictures’ in her textual content, she writes:

The pictures included on this guide present folks from completely different areas, with the bearing, gestures, and costumes of the patriarchal period. The photos are paperwork of a bygone time, since these costumes and in addition partly the expressions of the folks have disappeared to a fantastic extent in most elements of Yugoslavia. Like the stories of my interviewers, the photographs caught their topics on the final second,earlier than the storms of historical past spoiled their fashion. Their magnificence, grown by means of centuries, disappeared in just a few years below the blows of enemy occupation and preventing in the course of the Second World War and the onrush of the machine period.⁴⁶

Erlich’s apply invitations consideration of positionality, as a lot as illustration. Through her training and relative privilege, she maybe shared extra in frequent with Durham and Hasluck than her ‘fellow’ countrywomen. In the preface to Family in Transition, she writes that her ‘school project’:

…started in Zagreb in 1937, when a bunch of scholar buddies recommended that I write for the Yugoslav press collection of articles on the place of Moslem [Muslim] girls. The college students had been bitter concerning the “enslavement” of their sisters who had been married within the conventional method. I used to be not very keen about attacking the ladies’s veil or the lattice window, however I used to be keen to check and report on Bosnian household life.⁴⁷

Erlich’s inquiry rapidly prolonged, as fellow ethnologists and sociologists quickly started to share comparable accounts of ‘bride purchase’ and ‘bride abduction’ in Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia.⁴⁸ Invitations from college students, academics, medical doctors, and judges—predominantly males—in distant villages quickly adopted.⁴⁹ Erlich, like Durham, was conscious of the gendered nature of those encounters, and explicitly described her venture’s turning into ‘the last record of the patriarchal social system which was about to crumble.’⁵⁰ It is ambiguous, the extent to which she perceives this course of as optimistic or destructive, her accounts tinged with nostalgia for a Yugoslavia that not existed.

Erlich not solely shared in Durham’s imaginative and prescient of documenting ‘the last tribal system in Europe,’ however in strategies and course of.⁵¹ What was at stake in Durham, Hasluck, and Erlich’s lives knowledgeable their approaches to their work. Erlich, as a ‘Yugoslav’ working in Yugoslavia on the precipice of battle, struggled to achieve entry, typically finishing her work with the excuse of accumulating information on venereal ailments for the Institute of Hygiene.⁵²

Indeed, all of those anthropologists, together with Hasluck, share a background in humanitarian work in the course of the main wars in Europe which, crucially, additionally permitted them entry to their topics. During World War II, Erlich labored as an UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) social employee in southern Italy.⁵³ Whilst working with Yugoslav refugees, she continued to gather materials on their pre-war household lives, evaluating the accounts of the refugees with the surveys she had already gathered.⁵⁴ It is unclear whether or not she ever maintained contact or relation following the publication of the textual content, following the ‘end’ of the wars, and in diasporic contexts; her questions stay unanswered:

Were these people going to behave overseas, in wartime, as my research confirmed? Would they continue to be true to the kinds I had discovered after they had been nonetheless welded within the framework of the household?

Following the wars within the Nineteen Forties, Erlich moved to the United States, the place she obtained a doctorate in anthropology and labored as a lecturer on the University of California. This expertise knowledgeable her transnational, comparative, and cross-cultural method to anthropology, which she practiced on her return to Zagreb within the early Sixties. She writes little or no, nevertheless, concerning the relation between the central University of Belgrade, from the place she was typically despatched, and the locations she visited within the former Yugoslavia. There is a brief crucial interrogation as to why these ‘excited’ males so willingly volunteered their communities, in a form of minority show-and-tell. ‘This is where you can see archaic life!’, one boast, means that the invitation was much less primarily based on the welcome and consent of the communities, and extra some type of gross self-othering. This raises the moral duty of those that select to and are able to speaking and representing communities for different publics—a duty that includes anthropologists as Erlich, artists as Knežević, and writers, because the writer of this textual content, in diasporic contexts alike.

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Of all of the devices at these anthropologists’ disposal, the digicam is scarcely talked about. The Appendices of Erlich’s Family in Transition, which additional element ‘The Method Used,’ make no point out of images. Though she names all of her interviewers and surveyed villages—the place they consented, and the information survived—the themes of the photographs stay unnamed, anonymised, as beforehand noticed within the practices of Durham and Hasluck. The shut photographs, typically of specific trades or practices, mirror the photographs’ extra documentary objective.

Erlich’s intent coheres with—and reinforces—the institutional logic of assortment. Above the digicam, she prioritises paper questionnaires and colored pencils used to graph ‘statistical results,’ suggesting a pursuit of objectivity typical of anthropological apply.⁵⁵ This remedy of subjective and specific lived experiences—as a way to an finish—is clear in her method, as she describes ‘cross-examining’ her topics to test her personal analysis. Erlich describes the transformation of her findings into factual materials, her effort to condense the ‘excess … and the emotional nature of the reports…to an objective common denominator…[I] assembled and analyzed my matter, drew graphs, and calculated percentages’.⁵⁶

Perhaps the anthropological ambivalence towards images displays an ambivalence towards the medium itself, as a type of prompt documentation. Durham and Erlich deliberated over their representations—whether or not in watercolour work, or the drawing of graphs. This slower, extra attentive mode of trying might have held better significance for Durham, although shouldn’t be separated, as inventive types of visible illustration.

From the black-and-white of the RAI emerge photographs of vivid orange and blue, a few of which had been taken by Captain Evan MacRury. These photographs embody representations of Tosks (and maybe additionally Ghegs), ethnic subgroups of Albanians, and different ethnic minorities described as ‘tribesmen’. A web page of pictures by ‘Mrs. Tuck’, taken earlier than Durham’s first journey, provides no additional details about the photographer.

Beyond the British Museum, many extra photographs presently exist solely within the written type. In his account of Durham’s articles and letters associated to Albania, Harry Hodgkinson writes fleetingly of a ‘touching, idyllic picture’ of King Nikola of Montenegro, by Emily, Viscountess or Lady Strangford (1826-1887).⁵⁷ For his half, Nikola had engaged Durham, as Commissioner, within the illustration of Montenegro within the Balkan States Exhibition held at Earl’s Court in London in 1907.⁵⁸ Durham introduced thirty sepia print pictures, illustrating the antiquities, costume, and surroundings of Montenegro, alongside eighteen watercolour work of the panorama or ‘scenery’, and different representations by British artists and travellers.⁵⁹ A lot of the photographic postcards from the show stay within the Bankfield Museum assortment. As a promoting exhibition, many extra works would possibly stay elsewhere in Britain.

This occasion of Durham’s curatorial work introduced her to the eye of the RAI, of which she grew to become a Fellow in 1908.⁶⁰ Here she was related with the likes of Professor Sir William Ridgeway, Fellow and President (1908-1910)—who, for his half, collected materials from each Durham and (Frederick) Hasluck, a degree of connection between the 2 anthropologists.⁶¹ A deeper studying of such exhibitions, which shared their colonial method with Great Exhibitions, World’s Fairs, and later, Expos—exposes the gazes of their topics, as a lot as their organisers and publics. In the case of these visiting from Montenegro:

The Montenegrins had been appalled how, in capitalist London, males didn’t seem to grasp that it’s not consonant with masculine dignity to interact in something so humiliating as work. And after they noticed the natives working as blacksmiths they might solely conclude that the English had been a nation of gypsies.⁶²

Hodgkinson implies a western/European ‘tendency—this psychological need, if you like—to [the] idealisation’ of Albania, to which Durham was social gathering ‘despite her down-to-earth character.’⁶³ This essentialising perspective undermines the company of Durham and her contemporaries. Other British anthropologists and teachers, who had been typically extra supportive of the Serbs, additionally criticised Durham. Author Rebecca West described Durham because the form of traveller who got here again ‘with a pet Balkan people established in their hearts as suffering and innocent, eternally the massacree and never the massacrer.’⁶⁴ In her personal writing, she additionally deferred to inventive representations, within the evocation of stereotypes:

The Bulgarians, as most popular by some, and the Albanians, as championed by others, strongly resembled Sir Joshua Reynolds”s image of the Infant Samuel.⁶⁵

Durham labored with an consciousness of the media, and thru her inventive apply. Indeed, nearly all of the pictures within the RAI assortment are categorised as ‘genre’, however just a few are thought of as ‘art works’. These are pictures the place Durham intervened by hand with paint to boost the shadow or little, a standard apply to arrange a picture for mass printing.⁶⁶ Following Alexandre Ken, and later, Suren Lalvani, the method of retouching highlights that which is lacking or absent from the primary shot, and additional detaches the picture from its context and actual topic.⁶⁷ Indeed, the remedy of the Durham pictures displays the continued marginalisation of girls, on the idea of medium, strategies of analysis, and gender:

In the 1900s, in fact, public opinion didn’t have the benefit of the present-day circus of cameramen and observers, politicians and negotiators, who comply with the circuit of successive crises. And the duty of holding it knowledgeable devolved on devoted and skilled people: journalists just like the legendary J.D. Bourchier of The Times in Bulgaria, and newbie travellers of intelligence and braveness like Edith Durham.⁶⁸

It needs to be questioned which sorts of expertise merited Bouchier above Durham. One overview of her collective—and incomplete—anthropological works in print, Some Tribal Origins, Laws and Customs of the Balkans (1928), reinforce the significance of her personal lived expertise. ‘She can hardly be described as a systematic anthropologist in the academic sense; her books are replete with the raw materials, the stuff and matter of ethnology and folklore, and are a mine of information of great value to these sciences. As an authority in the field, she probably had no rival.’⁶⁹

A recent encounter with these photographs, then, shouldn’t solely query dominant narratives within the current, however these dominant throughout the context of their making. They have an instrumental perform in verifying and difficult accounts, and thus, the predominance of textual content. For occasion, written accounts of Durham’s travels emphasise her arrival in Kotor, present-day Montenegro; In her first assortment on the British Museum, from The Burden of the Balkans, Dalmatia is excluded altogether. Montenegro was notably fashionable on the time, perceived as ‘exotic but welcoming’:

Here, for the classically minded, was a race of Homeric warriors, wild in look – with even a contact of Rousseau’s Noble Savage, maybe—however not unamenable to the gold sovereigns and napoleons and kroner of the vacationer.⁷⁰

Photographs and postcards from Bankfield Museum in Halifax, nevertheless, counsel that Durham’s voyage seemingly first stopped in Dalmatia, the Adriatic coastal area of my mom’s start. As the aforementioned account continues, those that travelled by the Lloyd Triestino cruise liner would ‘thread[ing] the Roman ruins and Venetian campanili on route, wondering at Zara [Zadar] whether to sip Ulahovi’s maraschino or Lycardo’. Following her photographs, nevertheless, Durham appeared to have paid nearer consideration to the boats docked at Adriatic factors, adorned with a carved eye, to ‘guide the way’. Most would have carried the information issued by the Union of the Encouragement of Local Economic Initiatives of Royal Dalmatia—600 pages, eight volumes—together with particulars of ‘an Optional Excursion into Montenegro’, which Durham chosen.⁷¹

Though in full command of ‘Serbo-Croat’, Durham by no means ‘mastered’ the Albanian language, partially a results of its completely different, competing alphabets. The writer of this account, Harry Hodgkinson, describes these alphabets as ‘positively hieroglyphic,’ in one other occasion of temporal othering and orientalisation. In this context, Durham’s photographs—as a visible language, and mode of communication—are thus much more vital. Though we might not be capable to decide if and the way her photographs had been perceived by the sitters and topics in Albania then, by means of exhibition and show, we might be taught and make many extra accounts within the current.

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The language of images—and ‘shooting’—displays the connection between the medium and types of violence.⁷² In these three instances, the photographs of the digicam and the mass violence of battle are intimately associated, each of their wartime content material and context, and the intent of the photographers to guard or protect that which is susceptible to loss. In the context of the destruction of land, folks, communities, and cultural heritage in the course of the civil wars of the Nineties, these British collections have ‘preserved’ Yugoslavia—a rustic that not exists—past the borders of house and time.

In the colonisation of African societies by European powers, images served many functions, together with the categorisation and commodification of individuals to bolster social hierarchies. Whilst embracing the plural legacies of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires in Europe, as mentioned, all three anthropologists bolstered sure ethnic and racial variations together with by means of images, contributing to the development and perpetuation of sorts.

As Chiara Bonglioni suggests, Erlich tried to clarify many customs in relation to imperial legacies, wars and conflicts, and the shift in direction of market economics, reasonably than important cultural or spiritual variations.⁷³ Beyond Dabac, the commercial transformation of Yugoslavia was sensitively photographed by Milan Pavić (1914-1986), in black-and-white photographs of on a regular basis life within the Nineteen Fifties, of employees and new factories, and other people on islands of the Adriatic coast. Pavić’s photographs are clearly and punctiliously composed, and delightful, affording the identical consideration and respect to every context of his apply. Erlich’s personal distinction between ‘modern’ and ‘old style’ areas in Yugoslavia, although binary, was maybe much less hierarchical than that of her friends, with out orientalisation or suggestion of western/European cultural superiority.

These methods of seeing persist, and form experiences of battle, displacement, and trauma. The continued White (Other)ing⁷⁴ of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European identities has been challenged by means of up to date artwork. In the general public artwork venture Bosnian Girl (2003), artist Šejla Kamerić layers derogatory graffiti by an unknown Dutch UN soldier over her personal enlarged picture. The textual content, discovered at a military barracks in Srebrenica in the course of the wars in Bosnia (1992–1995), displays the persistence of patriarchal constructions—opposite to the demise Erlich foretold by Erlich. In this act of self-portraiture, she suggests how girls grow to be representatives of nationwide identification, their our bodies politicised to face—or fall—for territories and borders. In her gaze, staring straight on the digicam, she calls for the viewer’s accountability for their very own methods of trying, for his or her position in methods of prejudice and ignorance.

Though grounded in her specific experiences of the wars in Yugoslavia within the Nineties, Kamerić’s picture has been utilized in respect to the experiences of girls in conflicts the world over. Thinking with Kamerić’s work prompts additional consideration of the political stances of those anthropologists. In her later years, Durham was strongly criticised by advocates of a Yugoslav state, each in Yugoslavia and its diasporas, who supported the incorporation of the Albanian-populated area of Kosovo into Yugoslavia. Her eccentric persona, energetic lobbying, and anti-Serb place made her disliked by the British authorities and Foreign Office.⁷⁵ Their distaste was actually gendered; inside this century, she has been described once more as a ‘difficult woman’.⁷⁶

Hasluck briefly labored for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a British governmental organisation, throughout World War II. As a staunch anti-communist, she resigned from her place when the British authorities moved their help from the Royal Yugoslav Army (JV) to the Partisans led by Josip Broz Tito, perceived as the best resistance towards the Nazis.⁷⁷

Erlich writes concerning the race to finish her publication towards ‘an oncoming flood’ of fascism, and her personal miraculous survival.⁷⁸ In her flight by means of Yugoslavia, she had managed to hold the suitcase containing her surveys thus far from Nazi-occupied Zagreb, by means of Italian-occupied Dalmatia, over the karst mountains to the island of Vis, the headquarters of the Partisans. The suitcase, stowed away in a cellar, was later dispatched to her place of refuge in southern Italy, and have become the inspiration of Family in Transition.

A crucial article by Savka Andic revealed in 2025, that includes a number of the first reproductions of the pictures within the textual content, was briefly faraway from public entry because of the cyber-attack on the British Library. It has, solely just lately, returned on-line within the type of a low decision screenshot (the pictures had been first photographed, reasonably than scanned, from the textual content). The place of this specific analysis displays not solely Erlich’s precarious place, however the precarity of the establishment itself.

The pictures from Erlich’s textual content are usually not held nor noticed with the likes of Durham or Hasluck, nor any of the aforementioned practitioners. Together, such views may expose and problem such a singular ‘gaze’ of Britain and western/Europe on the area. Over time, they spotlight continuities between the Balkan Wars and World War I, World War II, and the Yugoslav Wars, which can be essential to know the continuation of battle and violence at the moment, and to maneuver past the occasion. They additionally speculate extra advanced relations between Albania, Kosovo, and Serbia, and thus current a chance to interact with underrepresented, typically marginalised diasporic communities who reside in Britain, native to those collections. Yet of their present place, they symbolize lingering prejudices, equally underdeveloped and hidden in plain sight.

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I don’t suggest the restitution of those photographs, nor objects, to their locations of origin.⁷⁹ Unlike sculptures, artworks, and devotional objects trafficked from colonial African nations, they had been largely bought or gifted. By coming into, and residing, in collections throughout Britain, over time, they’ve grow to be diasporic objects.⁸⁰ As mentioned, presently constituted, these collections and accounts, as West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, are extra revelatory of up to date views in Britain than within the Balkans.

In the primary occasion, although, I do name for his or her freer motion throughout the borders of their very own establishments. Beyond momentary exhibitions, shows, or loans, the Durham pictures on the British Museum may exist in various different locations. The Durham pictures on the British Museum may exist in various different locations. We may think them with the silver coin of the bust of Milan Obrenović IV, former Prince (1868-1882) and King (1882-1889) of Serbia, at the moment saved within the Department of Money and Models, or an 1896 rendering of Queen Natalija Obrenović, which will be situated in Prints and Drawings. Durham writes of each, and the succession histories of Serbia, in Twenty Years of Balkan Tangle (1920). This coming collectively would elevate fascinating questions concerning the viability, as a lot of visibility, of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Moving forwards, we would learn in Durham’s photographs a deep curiosity within the pure atmosphere. The titles of her texts suggest the plurality of ‘lands,’ and the singularity of individuals (‘the Serb’). Many drawings, pictures, and written descriptions of Durmitor, one of many highest factors in Montenegro, start her first scrapbook, MY BALKAN NOTEBOOK VOLUME I, reflecting its main curiosity.

Following the free chronology of the archive, we encounter locations by means of the seasons, most strikingly, the snow-covered mountains and valleys in spring. The reverse of 1 slide reveals not {a photograph}, however a pasted rendering or drawing, maybe the karst panorama. It is harking back to summary works by Zoran Mušič (1909-2005) additionally held within the Department of Prints and Drawings. Durham once more, although, slips from view.

In the method of excavating the Durham pictures, the establishment encounters extra supplies. Three packing containers of slides from a analysis go to, or maybe a vacation, seem, by means of shut research towards a lightbox. We suppose the 12 months is 1959, for one of many first photographs, the ‘Unspoilt Adriatic!’ of Podgora, on the Dalmatian coast of present-day Croatia. Less picturesque scenes emerge.

As in Durham’s collections, the photographer’s notes are important. From North Macedonia, they quickly journey to Prilep in Kosovo; the be aware ‘Serbia’ on one slide is the one indication that forestalls the viewer at the moment mistaking the landscapes of this volcanic, ‘earthquake country’ for the town of the identical identify in North Macedonia.

Though their spelling isn’t excellent, most place names are identifiable. The objective of their journey, and locations, nevertheless, stays unclear. What brings collectively the ruins of Stari Bar and Stobi, with the ladies’s mosque in Novi Pazar, in southwestern Serbia?. The determine ‘Dowden’ is ascribed to most of the slides. Another, named ‘Phil’, seems shopping for an apron in Struga Market, Ohrid, and on the crushed monitor between Mavrovo and Galičnik in North Macedonia. They supply no clues concerning the traveller or their companion. We can suppose these slides had been used for research or lectures, however they don’t seem to be named, not catalogued, and never identified. Perhaps Durham’s pictures may share within the ambiguity afforded to those slides as ‘non-objects,’ supplies that are saved by the Museum however not accessioned or formally a part of the gathering.

Photographs and photographic materials have an odd standing all through the British Museum’s collections, one thing which actually calls for additional research. These specific unrecorded slides—just like the negatives—are bodily current absences inside these establishments. Absence, nevertheless, isn’t solely destructive. Following Peggy Phelan, visibility doesn’t routinely equal energy. Visibility may result in seize and the lack of opacity.⁸¹ Through efficiency artwork, Phelan refuses the fetish of visibility that dangers turning artwork into content material to be consumed. In our up to date context, this method may apply to photographs and objects that weren’t created as visible artworks, however documentation, too.

To resist the impulse to contemplate these photographs as artworks doesn’t essentially imply to withstand the impulse of curation, taking the verb actually, as a type of taking good care of the sitters and topics they depict. The doc—right here the {photograph} or destructive—performs a crucial position within the politics of reminiscence. In its absence, there’s a house that enables for pondering past the prevailing logics of the establishment. By current by means of disappearance, efficiency and time-based mediums create house with potential for the realisation of subjectivity, past that which appears predetermined. A performative response to absence—whether or not of the bodily object, or the unrecorded tales of the themes—could possibly be extra constructive for the current, than efforts to get well what has been misplaced to record-keeping, cataloguing, and time.

It is a distinct expertise to come across absence within the photographic archive at the moment. Working with the context of the Iraq War, Alain Badiou considers that the primary moral act is to acknowledge the ‘not-seeing’ produced by the bombardment of photographs within the media. This operates as a regime of visibility, which authorises what could also be seen, whereas consigning the remainder to non-existence, and politically insignificance, by means of invisibility.”⁸² In/visibility is thus not a binary, however a logic and set of lenses that may decide what might seem.

This specific encounter with Durham’s photographs is an train in starting from this place, of ‘not-seeing’. It is a pursuit of truths within the traces, fragments, and losses of those photographs and collections extra extensively. In this sense, the encounter—or Azoulay’s occasion— is itself a type of proof. My place, intervention, and reinterpretations of those archives are additionally ‘contemporary practices’ in historical past writing. My photocopying turns into a photographic act.

Acknowledging the ethnographic facet of all photographic apply is important to understanding the better influence of images upon historical past, tradition, and aesthetics. My personal encounter is mediated—and solely attainable—by means of this assortment being in Britain, by means of the archivists and curators who facilitate my entry. Durham and Hasluck loved a disproportionate standing as foreigners within the Balkans. As Robert Wilton writes, the locations which bear memorials of those girls:

haven’t lacked for spectacular girls of their very own, however in an enduringly patriarchal and socially conservative world, they’ve struggled to say autonomous roles, not to mention have influence and drive change. Wars of ethnic identification have lengthy relegated the struggles for social equality. In Durham’s time, girls reminiscent of Staka Skenderova in Bosnia and Marija Jurić Zagorka in Croatia had been preventing lonely and protracted campaigns for ladies’ training and girls’s rights (and certainly girls’s writing). Kosovo’s extraordinary Shote Galica is widely known as a warrior however requires excuses to be made for her lack of femininity. A Serbian or Albanian girl anthropologist wouldn’t have been in a position to go to and symbolize Serbian and Albanian villages as Durham did, benefiting from their legendary highland hospitality; her inappropriateness was excused as foreignness.⁸³

This context continues to tell others’ efforts to analysis at the moment, not solely within the presence of those partial historic accounts, however poor cataloguing practices, restricted entry to funding for analysis, and now, funding cuts. ‘Unfortunately it was not possible for the author to view collections in storage, due to building work and staff shortages,’ is a frequent chorus in Philippa Mackenzie’s analysis revealed over thirty years previous to this text, that resounds within the current institutional context.⁸⁴

Durham’s Kodak Brownie digicam is but to be situated in any of those collections. I search for Durham herself, however first encounter false finds. I’m guided by one of many clearest pictures of the anthropologist, taken on the studio of the youngest youngster of Julia Margaret Cameron, at 70 Mortimer Street, close to the British Museum.⁸⁵ Durham seems solely as soon as, on the finish of the ultimate album in two consecutive pictures. In the primary, she sits on a small black horse, her profile in shadow beneath her hat. In the second, she faces the digicam straight.

The photographer isn’t recorded.