Kunt Ernő szerk.: Kép-hagyomány – Nép-hagyomány (Miskolc, 1990)

I. RÉSZTANULMÁNYOK - Hoppál Mihály: Az amerikai magyar kivándorlók családi fényképeiről

made on family photos (reproductions) from their albums. Though we can attach only very few of these reproductions as illustrations we feel that even these may show the characteristic features of the whole material. According to the anthropological practice we did not mention here the families' names whose photos are shown but they can be identified in the Archive of Ethnographical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Their names are not important either because the families' social background was very similar: they were factory workers. They represent the lowest strata of the working class who has had his own house, a little garden, a car and a camera since the forties. (They may have a movie camera as well, for instance in one of the families with whom I could get acquainted one of the seven children has shot with his 16mm Bolex a few thousand metres of film about the most important family events since the 194()'s. In another family a 4 hour film can found on a coloured 8mm film made from 1960's to nowadays). Function of the Family Photographs Coming to the point of the examined photos I would like to widen the definition of the family photographs. In general only photos taken by the members of the family are considered to be family photographs. In the case of the American-Hungarians every photo found together and thought worth preserving by the members of the family are regarded as family photos. In other words family photo is every photo which belongs to the family: that is not only those which are made by the family but also those which are taken by professional photographers (e. g. photos taken about a wedding long time ago or about a dance group - photo 1-2). In the collection of the families I could see 50-250 photos were found, but only half of the families arranged the photos in albums. Since the beginning of photographing, the function of the memory keeping has been always emphasized especially by the advertisements. When we asked the American-Hungarians about the function of the photos in their life, their reminding role was stressed. („. . . our children can see from where we have come!" - said a worker aged 66.) Probably for this reason they keep the photos in album, and arrange them in more or less kept chronological order. Therefore the photo-album of the family is an illusztrated archive of the family's life. We will refer to this problem later, but now we enumerate the main types of the events (almost the same in every family) which the photos preserved. Looking at the photos taken before 1945 we can usually state that the „main events of the life" were captured and they were used almost exclusively as „a supporting element of ritual events" (Boerdam-Oosterbaan 1980:99-97). That is photographing became part of the family rite (Barthes 1985:11), or better to say that it demonstrates a creation of the folklore of a small closed community. The clicking of the camera confirms the moment and makes the stiffened gestures and motions solemn. It is true even if nowadays the themes and events of our everyday life are photographed more often, the photographed behaviour is not controlled and regulated. By photographing more frequently and by increasing the number of photos de-ritualization can be observed. The same slow profanation of the life-rites (wedding, baptising, funeral) can be noted as well. The ceromonial and rigid elements of these rites have decreased and there are more and more secular everyday features in them. In the study written about the family photographs, two Danish sociologists accepted these changes very appropriately as the democratization of photographing and the fact that it became more informal: „This democratization process could be summarized as follows: more opportunities have become available to more people to photograph more moments of everyday life. . . This process is closely accompanied by a