Kunt Ernő szerk.: Kép-hagyomány – Nép-hagyomány (Miskolc, 1990)
III. RÉSZ: A KONFERENCIA SAJTÓVISSZHANGJA
During the twentieth century, particularly after World War II, considerable changes took place in all spheres of life. They have been documented by arts such as photography, which, in the fifties and sixties, became one of the means of mass culture expression. This phenomenon was taken up by another group of scientists. Photography reflects not only the most important moments of private life, but also frequently is the chronicle of social life of a local ethnic group said E. Veinlich (Austria), in "Photography as Part of Folk Rite." In another paper, "Visual Ethnography: Reflexivity in Anthropology," M. Hoppal (Hungary), considered it as a source of a wider exposure of the fact of ethnic identification, for example, the photos of Hungarian ethnic groups living in the USA. His colleague, E. Kunt, used photos as symbols of cultural identification such as memory and oblivion in "To Recall and Forget: On the Example of Family Photos of Hungarian Peasants." The presentation bv U. Heising-Piltzing (FRG), dwelt on the problems of private photography, on the emergence of certain stereotypes. The subject of the study was the mass production of passport pictures by a professional photographer, which guaranteed an analysis concentrating on frequently repetitive characteristics. The visualized features of this photo series exemplify characteristics of visual data banks. According to Heising-Piltzing, this analysis proved that in these files of photographs, hidden facts can be discovered which moreover refer to further relations that could initiate profound research for historical purposes. It was also remarkable that television, as one of the means of mass media, has been brought to use as another visual source. Thus, the report by K.-D. Rath (West Berlin), "Peasant Life in Television —Television in Peasant Life," tackled issues of double importance: what programs dealt with peasant life and how was this represented; and in what way television (the medium, the broadcasts, and the activity of TV-watching) was considered by peasants since its emergence. The last aspect covered peasants' discontent over their "image" in many TV reports about them. The paper focused further on the change in peasants' needs for information and social entertainment, time-grids, and the fact that in the mid-fifties, many farm workers moved to cities and acquired TV sets, since television was considered a representative of attractive urban culture. Generally, according to the author, television and its use made a symbolic network embracing and both partly preserving, partly changing, different forms of social activity, representation, and contemplation. In Raths view, the differentiation of TV markets could lead to specific programs for, and in some cases created by, peasants: "What would a peasant's television culture look like? Electronic lubok? . . ." Summing up the symposium, one could note that the majority of participants focused on the ethno-cultural aspects of research into the life of the European regional population, studied pictures as a historic-ethnographical source of research, and steered a proper orientation towards subsequent potential interpretations of visual production. All the presentations were accompanied by photos, slides, or videofilms, but some of them were overloaded with illustrations and lacked specific problems. Concluding discussion showed different approaches: some scholars were inclined to consider pictures in a narrow aspect, while others stated the fact that very often ethnologists pretended to give interpretations of
