Ethnographic Photographs
Karel Plicka (photographer)
[1900]
42.0 x 34.0 cm
GT 820 C95 P72
This album of photographs by Czech photographer, filmmaker, and ethnographer Karel Plicka offers a portrait of the people of Czechoslovakia in twenty pictures.
The impulse to document a culture through photographs is related to other anthropological and documentary practices of the early-twentieth century, such as German photographer August Sander’s People of the Twentieth Century and American photographer Edward Curtis’s The North American Indian. Each of these photographic projects aim to circulate knowledge about the people and cultures they represent, yet they do so through the dominant artistic styles and ideologies of their time. Here, Plicka views the people of Czechoslovakia through a Pictorialist lens.