Publication details
Das Fotoarchiv als Netzwerk : Drahomíra Stránská und die Netzwerke der Amateurfotografie in der tschechoslowakischen ethnografischen Dokumentationsbewegung (1918–1939)
| Title in English | Photographic Archive as Network : Drahomíra Stránská and Networks of Amateur Photography in the Czechoslovak Ethnographic Survey Movement (1918–1939) |
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| Year of publication | 2026 |
| Type | Article in Periodical (without peer review) |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
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| Description | This article explores the interplay between the photo archive as a mechanism of control and unruly network of visual record suppliers that resist such authority, and particularly focuses on the epistemic consequences of such a dynamic. As is generally recognised, archives function as sites of power and control over knowledge production with their contents and systems of operation. State-run photo archives wield their power with special effect, as they control the representation and visual knowledge of nations, communities, minorities, and ethnic groups. But what happens when this archival power structure is challenged by an uncontrollable network at the stage of the archive’s conception? This article examines an interaction between the archive and the network through the case of building the Central Photo Archive in Prague in the early 1930s, a process that included the structure of loosely organised amateur photographers. Prague became the capital of the First Czechoslovak Republic, formed in 1918 from the union of three economically and culturally diverse northern regions of the collapsed Habsburg monarchy - the Czech Lands, Upper Hungary and Subcarpathian Ruthenia. In its early years, the young state sought to establish a central visual repository documenting the various folk cultures living within its territory. For this reason, in 1932, Drahomíra Stránská, the director of the Department of Ethnography at the National Museum in Prague between 1930 and 1940, launched an initiative for the building of the central photographic archive. Given the scarcity of trained ethnographers who would have shared the same idea of the photo archive and its contents, Stránská turned to local camera clubs with the vision to utilise the loosely organised amateur photographers around them to supply visual records to the archive. An informal structure of this kind, dispersed and constructed of a vast number of independent photographers, driven by various motivations, could not be controlled by its very nature of constantly shifting relationships and fluctuation of actors. By exploring the tension and negotiations between Stránská’s desire to build an archive storing ethnographic evidence and the networks of individual amateur photographers longing for self-expression, this article argues that by publicly inviting a wide range of amateurs to submit photographs to the archive, Stránská destabilised and challenged the authority and power structure of the archive, allowing members of the wider public to contribute to its formation. It further demonstrates that the creation of the central photo archive, through the participation of diverse actors, enabled these contributors from the wider public to shape a particular image of the new Czechoslovak nation according to their own preferences and imaginations, thereby influencing the very knowledge the archive came to contain. |
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