New temporary photo exhibition at the Museum of Ethnography

The temporary photo exhibition Together. Images of Inaktelke 2000-2002, is opening on 5 March 2024. It presents the life of a village in Kalotaszeg and the community relations that run the village.

There are many stories that can be told about a village. Erzsébet Winter, a photographer of the Museum of Ethnography, took about a thousand slides in Inaktelke (Inucu, Romania) between 2000 and 2002 for documentation purposes. Selected from these, a curatorial construction has emerged that focuses primarily on everyday life, the relationships that sustain the community, the connections between the individual and the community, and community norms and rules, but does not seek to present the totality of village life. The spaces of community life - the outskirts, the street, the church, the benches outside the gates, and the dwellings - are also the thematic units of the exhibition.

The images shown are digital prints of pieces from the Museum of Ethnography slide collection. Ethnographic field photography aims to record and document objectively, yet the results are subjective and often contingent, despite all scientific efforts. It is a rare and fortunate situation when a photographer can work alongside a researcher who knows the community well and can compose the data, and experiences gathered in the field into images. This is how Erzsébet Winter and Hajnalka Fülöp, one of the curators of the exhibition, worked in Inaktelke at the turn of the millennium. The presence of other ethnographers and photographers is not unknown to the people of Inaktelke: they have long documented the festive village, the ornate Kalotaszeg costumes, furnishings, and spectacular celebrations. The exhibition intends to break with this tradition and presents the lesser known, less impressive, but just as colorful everyday life.

The aim of the exhibition is to draw attention to hidden values and complex meanings of ethnographic field photography and its multiple interpretations, thus elevating images from the illustrative role of documentary field photography. Seemingly simple photographs with barely perceptible small elements reveal a surprising amount about the villagers' way of life and mentality. The repetitive details of many similar images reveal the values and rules of the community.

In 2023, the museum staff returned these photos, taken more than 20 years ago, to Inaktelke and interviewed the families in the photos. The film on show at the exhibition tells the stories and memories associated with the photos.

The symbol of the community is the circle that holds and rules. The dominant visual elements of the exhibition are the circular arches that divide the space, which refer to the community links and represent the physical space of the village. The circles of the exhibition can be crossed indicating that the community it represents is not closed either, that its inhabitants are connected to their immediate and wider environment. Moving from the outside inwards, we move from the outskirts into the homes of the villagers, and from the community into personal spaces.

The exhibition is like a family photo album: it is one thing for the villagers, one for those who know the village, and yet another for those who have never been there. If the pictures seem familiar, it may be because they do indeed resemble family photos of any of us, which we will hopefully look at in a slightly different way, more consciously, with more attention to detail and different meanings.