I specialized in Museum Studies and History of Photography at the Ecole du Louvre, Paris, and St. Andrews University, Scotland. From 2019 to 2021, I worked with indigenous communities living in the Laguna Blanca Biosphere Reserve, in the Andean Precordillera of Northwestern Argentina, in partnership with the National University of Catamarca Department of Anthropology.

My research focuses on the ethnographic issues of photographic collections made in Albania during the Cold War. It starts from the observation and comparison of visual archives produced by French Greek and Albanian ethnologists during the communist period in Albania, that is to say since the end of the Second World War until the fall of the communist regimes of the Eastern Bloc.

From these photographic materials, often accompanied by field notebooks and epistolary correspondence, I intend to map the networks of scientific collaboration that have contributed to the academic and institutional definition of Anthropology as a discipline. This objective will be met by a double operation of characterization of the political and cultural contexts of production of the archives, and of interpretation of the intentions with which these so-called “ethnographic” photographs were conceived. My hypotheses will make it possible to question the history of the interdisciplinary relations between European ethnology as it was constituted after the Second World War, and visual anthropology, the new methods of which were then being elaborated.

My thesis engages a reflection on the ethnographic uses of photography as an instrument of knowledge and a mediating tool promoting intersubjective encounters between the ethnologist and his interlocutors. It is therefore a question, when facing these partial and biased images, of confronting the gaps in visual representation with the historical circumstances these images were created in.

What are the specificities of the ethnologists’ photographic contributions along the second half of the twentieth century in a southeastern European country under the grip of a communist dictatorship?