The word “folk”, as Aaron Schuman notes in his intriguing afterword to this photobook of that title, has several meanings. It can refer to members of one’s family, to the ”ordinary people” of a locality or even an entire country, as well as to the traditional art and culture that has its roots in the beliefs, rituals and customs of those same people. Schuman’s book touches on all three as it delves into the rich and mysterious archive of the Ethnographic Museum in Kraków and, through it, into his own family history.
Schuman’s interest in the archive began when he was asked to curate Kraków Photo Month in 2014. While being shown around the museum, the respected photography writer found that he was connecting with certain images and objects therein on a deeper level than the purely academic. Some kind of buried folk memory was being awakened that had to do with the fact that his great grandfather was born in the village of Cierpisz, about 150km east of Kraków, and had emigrated to America at the age of 22.
Alongside his own correspondence with the Kraków festival director, Schuman includes extracts from a diary his mother made when she travelled to Poland in 2011 to try and trace her family’s history. An entry from 23 March reads: “Walked over to Ethnographic Museum. Very good – costumes, farm implements, painted eggs, house interiors, model of mill. Took cab back to hotel for a rest…” Interestingly, it is this emphasis on the everyday “folk” life of the region that Schuman evokes in the book, which merges found photographs of people and things with his own photographs of artefacts and the folksy environment of the museum itself.
Throughout, the reader is left to make the connections between people, place and things – there are no explanatory captions or dates – with only Schuman’s correspondence to shed light on the deeper resonances. We learn that the sickle, which features in several still lifes, was a tool in Poland used by women while men wielded the bigger, heavier scythe. We learn that the miller was often considered an outsider – not a real farmer – in rural communities and that successful millers were thought to have sold their soul to the devil. Elsewhere, though, the book is a kind of repository of mysterious objects: makeshift dolls, embroidered lace fragments, elaborately decorated waistcoats, tools, patterns, costumes, drawings. And, of course, photographs, including several shots of people – students, researchers, cultural anthropologists – taking photos of people, places and things.
Folk, then, is a book about tradition and belonging, but also about how folk museums and what Schuman calls “museum people” curate these artefacts and, in doing so, direct our way of looking – and looking back.
Folk is published by NB Books (£30)
