(Re-) Imagining Hutsuls in the Interwar Period: Type Photographs in Nationalizing East-Central Europe

Abstract

In the late Habsburg Empire, type photographs became an important tool to visually order a complex and multicultural landscape of diverse regions. These frontal images not only stereotypized the image of “typical” representatives of a nation but also ascribed social and cultural roles to them. The East Central European follow-up states, in particular Czechoslovakia and Poland, adopted this imperial tool to create new images. Those images were ascribed with new meanings, adjusted to the realities, needs, interests, and concerns of the interwar “nationalizing states” (Rogers Brubaker). This paper focuses on photographic re-presentations of Hutsuls, an ethnographic minority in the Eastern Carpathians. It contrasts official photographic narratives in Czechoslovakia and Poland with approaches by the Ukrainian national movement, who insisted that Hutsuls would constitute and ancient “tribe” of their nation. I advocate the hypothesis that photographs served as equally important tools to communicate “nation” and “ethnicity” as the census or the museum (Benedict Anderson), which could be used to preserve “traditional” images or modernize selected features. Both the nationalizing states and the Ukrainian movement adopted photography in order to propa-gate their specific vision of the region and thereby rebrand it in the light of the new realities of the interwar period.