Workers in an ethnographic archive: On the strategies of (re-)constructing the past

Abstract

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.