It may suffice to look at a random stock photo website to understand the panel's relevance: The ethnicization of people on photographs and illustrations via labels and visual codes is as common nowadays as it was a hundred or more years ago. As the organizers Sarah Albiez-Wieck and Martin Rohde argued, the panel focused on a particularly impactful genre characterized by a specific combination of text and picture. So-called “Volkstypen” (“folk types”/”ethnic types”), mostly frontal photographs of people taken in studios or their alleged everyday surroundings but also painted illustrations were produced and distributed in masses from the turn of the 19th to the 20th century on. Not only did new media formats such as postcards, carte de visites, and collectible pictures enable hitherto unknown and often profitable circulation numbers. They also (re)produced alleged racial hierarchies, exoticized people, and tied certain people to a certain territory, while others were omitted. In short, they conveyed a certain order of the world, conceivable at the kitchen table at home.
As key factors responsible for the popularity of the so-called “Volkstypen”, Albiez-Wieck and Rohde in their introduction identified three developments coinciding in the late 19th century. Technological innovation brought forth new ways of capturing and measuring the world, as well as fast production and widespread circulation of media. Commodities like postcards were printed in ever higher quantities while the mail, transported via train, was delivered several times a day. Photography provided an alleged objectivity of the people and objects caught by the lens – an objectivity many people in the imperial societies of Europe and Northern America were highly interested in. The striking similarity of “folk-type” illustrations all over the globe supported the idea of objectivity and, thus, comparability. The interest in foreign and allegedly exotic people was fostered by a long and increasingly influential tradition of scientific racism. Ethnography, in particular, used photography as a tool to create and confirm taxonomies of people and races. Labeling photographs and the depicted people formed a substantial element of ethnographers’ methodology. Technological innovation and scientific racism correlated with the political situation at the time. Nationalism, imperialism, and colonialism as political and social paradigms found powerful and profitable expression in the genre of “folk types”.
With these developments as a foundation, the organizers brought up the questions of who produced these “folk types”, how they circulated, how they were received, and why they were so similar. The discussants picked up on these questions from different methodological starting points and offered insights into the often similar but also deviating role of “folk types” in the context of the German, Spanish, Habsburg, and Russian Empires, as well as their successor states, and the US.
Today, “folk types” can be found by the thousands in museum collections. They pose challenges to collection managers and curators, prompting debates on the approach to these objects. Starting from Susan Sontag’s statement of photography as an act of violence and predation1, CAROLINE BRÄUER (Cologne) discussed the actors and visual hegemonies in the German colonial context that enabled and created a derogatory “media system of colonial propaganda”. Media and the very act of photographing helped appropriate the colonies. Bräuer drew from approximately 30,000 photographs of German colonial provenance stored in the collections of the Rothenstrauch-Joest Museum in Cologne. During her time at the museum, she cooperated with several artistic projects that sought to break the colonial narrative of the pictures in different ways.
The artists and informal curators focused on the provenance and history of the photographs, assigned them several alternative titles (project “Gegenbilder”), or broke up the order and categorization of the archive by rearranging the pictures according to new categories (“Noisy images”). Another method Bräuer described, consisted in reversing the narratives' picture sequences. E.g., the man in uniform from the Philippines now loses the uniform, instead of climbing the alleged ladder of civilization (“Snare for Birds”). These strategies centered on making transparent the photographers’ and collectors’ categorization and revolved around the question of what to display and how.
MAREN RÖGER (Leipzig) highlighted the role of the producers editing and the recipients appropriating “folk-type” pictures, particularly on postcards. She drew from her research on the case study of Bukovina, and consecutive comparative studies.2 By the end of the 19th century, producers of postcards showing Eastern European regions were dominantly based in the imperial centers. Within a few years, the production shifted towards the regions themselves. There, the publishers developed the iconographic program of the region or city, a branding, influenced not only by their ideological or political stances. Profit, as Röger argued, had a significant impact on the choice of motives issued as postcards. Therefore, the publishers often oriented themselves towards a certain clientele, such as tourists or national movements. The other possibility was to issue polyvalent motives, open for interpretation and appropriation by the buyers.
Narratives of progress and backwardness ran along the dichotomy of infrastructure and people, according to Röger. Pictures of infrastructure and buildings were rarely derogatory. Persons starring on postcards, however, were often ethnicized, traditionalized, and essentialized. They appeared as obstacles or remnants in the process of modernization, helpless against the progress brought forth by the imperial state. While postcards ascribed peasants, roamers, and peddlers ascribed to a certain ethnic group – in the case of Jews often openly antisemitic –, burghers were set up as the ordinary and contrasting social norm in the background. The buyers in many cases supported narratives of denigration in their messages and even added them to seemingly neutral motives. Thus, “folk-type” postcards and their appropriation contributed to ordering the world according to a certain view. They were, as Röger concluded, “accomplices of nationalization”.
Scientists played a significant role in the creation and popularization of these visual hierarchies tied to ideas of progress and backwardness. SARAH ALBIEZ-WIECK (Münster) traced the trajectories of German and US-American scientists to the Philippines and Mexican students who researched the Mexican countryside. So-called “mestizos”, people considered to be of (often European/White and indigenous) mixed origin, took center stage in Albiez-Wieck’s presentation. The scientists inscribed racial hierarchies on the so-called “mestizos”, trying to determine their origin. “Folk-type” photographs formed part of the scientific apparatus. People of alleged European background were seen as superior. In the Mexican case, the students described some “mestizos” as more “indigenous” than others, trying to find parameters for the descriptions.
The photographs taken during the expeditions were shown to the public on various occasions and underlined claims to power. US photographer Dean Worcester, for example, exhibited pictures from the Philippines and, thus, argued that the people living there were not prepared for self-rule. “Folk-type” cards from this region of the world were also mass-produced, often in China. The producers and buyers did not think of depictions of ethnicized populations as art but as a commodity reinforcing racial hierarchies.
MARTIN ROHDE (Regensburg) focused on one specific ethnicized population, the so-called “Hutsuls”. During the interwar period, the new Polish, Czech, and Romanian states came up with different strategies for visually constructing and determining the place of the “Hutsuls” in the post-Habsburg societies. In Austria-Hungary, the “Hutsuls” had been depicted as “noble savages” in what Karl Emil Franzos described as “half-Asia”. In the course of World War I, however, they voluntarily fought in the Austrian army and even tried to found their own state in Jasine, today western Ukraine. Registering their assertive demeanor, the Habsburg-successor states sought ways to integrate the “Hutsuls” into the national narratives.
In Czechoslovakia, photographers produced knowledge on the new province of Podkarpatska Rus’ documenting the landscape and the region’s inhabitants. The pictures had certain documentary aspirations but also served internal exoticism. The “folk-type” pictures of “Hutsuls” became part of the touristic branding of the region and, by their exoticization, underlined the need for the state’s rule. In Poland, the “Hutsuls” were included in the national narrative by exploring their alleged Polish roots: “folk types” depicted them with Sarmatian features. According to Rohde, the general idea was that, with a little help, the “Hutsuls” could develop their potential in artisan craftwork and modernize partially. In contrast, Rohde did not find visual narratives promoted by the Romanian state in his research. However, local publishers adjusted their illustrations according to the policies of Romanization. “Hutsuls” were depicted as Wallachian and, thus, proto-Romanian peasants. Conclusively, Rohde argued that “folk types” were a key tool of nation-building and nationalization in the three interwar states under review.
“Folk types” were also pivotal in the construction of Equatorial Guinea’s national imagery. The starting point of ALBA VALENCIANO MAÑÉ (Madrid), however, was an ethnographic study of today’s “popó de la mujer” festivities on March 8. The fabric worn by many women on that day features a picture of a „typical woman“ from each alleged ethnic identity of the country. The visual repertoire is provided by the state and excludes parts of the population not fitting its categories. Valenciano Mañé argued that the celebrations strengthen the regime’s hegemony as well as traditional gender roles.
The national visual narrative roots in the Spanish and, especially, Francoist colonial administration, Valenciano Mañé demonstrated. By the end of the 19th century, masses of postcards depicting Spanish Guinean “folk types” were produced for colonial exhibitions. Most of the photographs originated in studios at the time, and the alleged ethnicities were not linked to a certain territory yet. By the mid-20th century, the photographs tied ethnicities to parts of the territory, while Nigerian workers or mixed-race communities were omitted. According to Valenciano Mañé, photographers and cinematic studios such as “Hermic Films”, laid the foundation for today’s system of ethnopolitical representation.
The political functions of so-called “folk-types” were at the heart of the following discussion. The speakers agreed that integration and exoticization were two sides of the same coin, suggesting the unity of the state externally and legitimizing the need for rule internally. Apart from the legitimation of rule, however, economic factors played an important role in the publishers’ choice of motifs, as Maren Röger pointed out. Masses of this commodity can be found in collections all over the world, prompting the concluding question about ways to decolonize museums, archives, and research disciplines. Bräuer and Valenciano Mañé concurred that there was still a lot of work to be done.
Section overview:
Head of section: Sarah Albiez-Wieck (Münster) / Martin Rohde (Regensburg)
Sarah Albiez-Wieck / Martin Rohde: Introduction
Caroline Bräuer (Köln): Typenfotografie – mediales System im kolonialen Kontext
Maren Röger (Leipzig): „Volkstypen“ als populärkulturelle Waren um 1900: Komparative Perspektiven auf Postkarteninszenierungen im östlichen Europa
Sarah Albiez-Wieck: „Mestiz@s“ (Post)kolonial. Rassifizierte Typenfotografie des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts aus Mexiko und den Philippinen
Martin Rohde: ‚Typen‘ des Grenzraums. Huzulenfotografien in Polen, Rumänien und der Tschechoslowakei, 1919-1939
Alba Valenciano Mañé (Madrid): “Folklorism”, “types” and “customs”: Legacies of Francoist colonialism in Equatorial Guinea
Notes:
1 Susan Sontag, On Photography, New York 1990, pp. 14–15.
2 Maren Röger, Karten in die Moderne. Eine visuelle Geschichte des multiethnischen Grenzlandes Bukowina 1895–1918, Dresden 2023; Vincent Hoyer / Maren Röger, Völker verkaufen. Politik und Ökonomie der Postkartenproduktion im östlichen Europa um 1900, Dresden 2023.