Looking for Bauh: Negatives and Prints from the Romanian Peasant Museum Image Archive

Abstract

The article discusses a number of Aurel Bauh prints and negatives from the collections of the Ethnological Archive of the Romanian Peasant Museum. The present study uncovers visual documentation relevant to the history of sociological research in Romania, while also proposing a new periodisation for some of the prints and negatives found in the Ethnological Archive collections. This research is at the core of a visual literacy and digital curation project developed by the Romanian Peasant Museum in 2018 entitled Reţelele Privirii. The project was imagined as a starting point for a program of digitization and publication that will make available to the wider public the entirety of the Ethnological Archive collections in the following years. In this context, the pilot project developed around Bauh’s work is representative not only for the type of artefacts amassed by the museum, but also for the manner in which this cultural heritage was handled throughout this institution’s history. Bauh’s work bridges several research fields that are relevant for recent cultural history in Romania. It also points to a number of instances and contexts that can shed light on the local history of photography. Furthermore, Aurel Bauh’s life and work make him an excellent case study for an artist tackling the ideological fluctuations that characterized the European cultural landscape in the first half of the twentieth century.