***

When I finally encounter Durham’s collections at the British Museum, following months of research online, I am surprised. I am presented neither with disordered boxes nor negatives, but photographic albums of high quality prints, each stored in a plastic pocket, and marked with reference numbers and corresponding notes. The vast amount of visual material—both actual and potential—is reduced down to these five, relatively modern, green albums.20 The task is seemingly simple—perhaps even ‘the work of a volunteer’—to scan and upload the prints online with their written descriptions, in relation to the two object numbers, their corresponding negatives, and any duplicates in the collection. (The Museum is working towards full digitisation of its collection in the next four years.)

Yet there’s something more to these photographs, unlike those I have previously seen. They are remarkably sharp, in contrast to the soft focus of Durham’s gaze in the photographs available online. Some thus resist the temporal othering of the pictured subjects and practices, placing them firmly in the present moment. Others are so sharp as to seem stranger than reality, not representing real people, but rather groups playing dress-up in a rural village, recreated as a set.

These photographs seem to be more than aide-mémoires; many could be mistaken for monochromatic mid-century photographic artworks. Durham, a watercolour painter rather than photographer by education, was clearly skilled with the lens, showing a clear command of light and shadow. These hundreds comprise a remarkable archive; even more so, considering likely only the ‘successful’ images were developed and printed. Some have a slight blur, reflecting the motion of life. Others bear a dark smudge, obscuring part of the scene. In fewer still, the figures have been partially developed, or solarised, and appear almost as ghosts. It is these images that seduce artistic and creative interpretation, in the gaze of the contemporary viewer.

In her extensive written accounts, Durham is not known to have expressed much interest or intent for her photographic practice. In the book Twenty Years of Balkan Tangle (1920), Durham writes about her first visit to Shkodër and Kosovo in 1901, which she began after getting an entry permit from the Ottoman authorities. Her first contacts and friends were the painters Kolë Idromeno and Ndoc Martini, and the aforementioned photographer, Marubi.21 Yet nothing is recorded in the book of these encounters, or their impact, if any, on her image-making.

A contemporary encounter in this archive should not be ‘guided by the imperial desire to unearth unknown ‘hidden’ moments,’ as Azoulay warns, a risk of reifying the colonial dynamic of the museum or institution.22 Following Azoulay, though, it is possible to engage with archival materials including photographs in ways which open conversation about their historical presents, rather than restricting their meaning to a determined, singular, past. Durham’s photographs, however, are presently organised by place and time, restricting their many narratives to a single, chronological one, whose subject is more Durham as the photographer, rather than the people and places depicted.

Durham actively used photography within her political work, evidenced by the presence of her images in her writing for newspapers and journals in Britain. Often privileged are her representational portraits, relatively few in number; the still images which preserve, and lock their subjects in time and type. Following Durham’s original captions, a whole ‘Cultural Group’ in the RAI database is devoted to ‘Gypsies,’ a derogatory term then commonly used to refer to Roma; another, to Old Turkish Bridges. Next to these images, Durham adds her field notes:

Out door forge at Podgoritza [Podgorica]; asserted by Montenegrins to be home of the ancestor of the Karageorge [Karadjordje] dynasty, who was a “black gypsy”; this the Karageorgevitches deny, but it is not improbable. [400_001985/MS-41-1-0009]

The notion of ‘primitivism’ is most explicit in her writing, which seemingly contradicts the empathy and respect afforded in her many photographs. On donation of her collection to the RAI towards the end of her life, she remarked her hope that, ‘in the future, they may be of interest as a record of the very primitive conditions in East Europe at the beginning of the 20th century.’

Yet the practices Durham captures speak to more complex, plural ways of being. Gender ambiguity is a frequent subject of Durham’s gaze; one of her best represented photographs today is that of an (unnamed) Albanian sworn virgin, presented most recently as part of Beyond the Binary: Gender, Sexuality, Power at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford (2021–2022). In High Albania, Durham explains the way in which, through swearing virginity, an Albanian woman could:

escape the husband to whom she [had] been sold’, and gain certain rights afforded to men including self-determination of dress, trading, and the carrying of arms. She continues that the practice was also undertaken ‘among the Moslem [Muslim] as well as the Christian tribes. But I met no examples. I heard of one who had served in the Turkish army.23

Despite her gender, Durham—who was guided through her travels exclusively by men, save for her very first holiday—was clearly detached from the women whose lives and practices seemed of greater interest to her work. In Blood Is thicker than Water (n.d.), she notes that ‘in the eyes of the [unsophisticated] tribeswoman I ranked as a male—as a junak (warrior).’24 Being considered as such was likely a source of pride for Durham.25 At times, her status even proves a point of amusement to her:

No woman was allowed to eat with me in a tribesman’s home. I ate with the men, but as they had to draw the line somewhere, they would often help my horse-boy first.26

Durham was certainly aware of the access her status—as a traveller and photographer—provided. In High Albania, she proudly remarks that she was treated with ‘great honour and classed with the buck-herd’. Simultaneously, her gender and ambiguous status enabled her unique access. ‘They also seemed to have an idea that as I am unmarried I belonged to the sworn virgin class and was fit to be associated with.’ Her images, however, reflect how this access was mediated by the men who informed, if not determined, her itineraries.27 It is notable that very few names are recorded with Durham’s images. Just sixty-four—or four percent—of the image records at the RAI are associated with a name and, where they are, they are generally people in positions of power, particularly religious authority, and men.28 Only the more privileged women, as evidenced by their dress, are photographed in frontal, staged portraits, such as Ike Pejovic, or Stojana [Nikoleva], ‘the baker’s wife’, both in Montenegro. Many others appear in homogenised groups, at the corners of the image, or the edges of public places. Durham was a copious, and deliberate, writer. These unnamed subjects stand as testament to the limited degree to which she personally engaged with those who populate the majority of her images.

Durham did not, as so often her counterpart men, seek out or seek to expose women. Consider the images of veiled Albanian women made by William Le Queux, and alluded to in his text, An Observer in the Near East (1907). The title implies the author”s detached perspective and gaze, which is enacted again upon the reader, in the absence of the photograph in the printed text. In Shkodër, he describes the ‘ghostly and mysterious” women he sees ‘shuffling’ through the streets, and arranges with an Albanian man to view, and photograph, his wife and sister-in-law without their veils.29

Andrew Neil Hammond responds to Le Queux’s travel writing, of the ‘spectacle’ of unveiling, as a form of ‘mastery’.30 If this passage does, as Hammond suggests, represent the contemporary and ‘unwavering confidence in language,’ then the photographs of our inquiry become all the more important, as visual proofs of alternative realities.

***

Photography is not an objective medium, but offers ways of looking and seeing that emerge out of subjective experience. Margaret Masson Hardie Hasluck (1885-1948), a younger contemporary of Durham’s, arrived in the Balkans by a different route. Hasluck studied at the University of Aberdeen before Cambridge, and, as a woman ‘without independent means,’ was sponsored by Jane Harrison to pursue further study at the British School at Athens. Here, she met and married its assistant director, Frederick Hasluck, and supported his work. Hasluck’s ethnographic fieldwork formally began following her husband’s death in 1920, though together they had travelled extensively in the region during World War I, with his work in British counter-intelligence and archaeological interests.31 A travelling fellowship from her alma mater in Scotland enabled her to embed herself in the region, building her own home in Albania where she lived from 1923 until the start of World War II.

Like Durham, Hasluck was most respected for her written research and publications, which included the first English-Albanian language reader. Both of their achievements are often framed as all the more remarkable due to their ‘unconventional’ journeys, via artistic (Durham) and classical (Hasluck) academic study, and immersion in the field, rather than the emergent academic field of social anthropology.32 In a letter to Beatrice Blackwood, curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, Durham wrote:

The ridiculous thing about me is that, until I was asked to read a paper at the Anthrop [RAI] I had hardly ever heard of anthropology, let alone read anything about it.33

This remark, from the first woman Vice President of the RAI, could be read as coy. Durham’s methods certainly differed to Hasluck’s—more ‘itinerant’, she travelled between communities, rather than staying with any one for a longer period, establishing grounds for both comparison and generalisation.34 Both of their approaches to image-making, nevertheless, reflect the visual and cultural concerns of both anthropology and ethnography.35 This begs a question about how the ethnographer uses photography to capture a ‘race’ or, here, ‘tribe.’ Looking through the camera—or at the image—with an ethnographic lens, what can we see?

Hasluck’s warm, sepia-toned, faded—nostalgic—images do not share the same aesthetic quality of those made by Durham. They are better kept, but similarly displaced from her object collections in Scotland at University College London, with a selection of 500 available to the public in their Digital Collections online. The rest are available for consultation, subject to the usual conditions of access to Archives and Manuscripts material, after the completion of a ‘Reader’s Undertaking,’ restricting their access to those undertaking academic—and likely, anthropological—research.36 Moving beyond these particular institutions, we might imagine the images replaced together with those of other women such as Vera Holme and Evelina Haverfield, known as Jack and Eve respectively, who served in the Scottish Women’s Hospitals in Serbia during World War I, and whose archives remain at The Women’s Library presently housed at the London School of Economics.37

In these cases, their object collections of ‘crafts’—often deemed the domain of women, or women’s work—are best known, cared for, and represented in institutions, more than their potential contributions to the field of photography. This is to say that the individual is displaced even within the institution, their practices and collections separated out by department or category.

As with separating negatives and prints, this process further detaches the images from their context. It also suggests that the anthropologist’s approach to photography is instrumental, one that does not value photography independently, but only in relation to the object. As June Hill, a curator and researcher of textiles, suggests of the Durham collection:

The extensive background material greatly enhances the material itself, and puts the textiles in their social context. Without such context, specimens can easily become mere curios – examples of antique work.38

In this way, it is clear how photography can function as part of the logic of collection, as both ownership and categorisation, rather than as a means of resisting it.39 Azoulay’s critique of the colonial dynamics inherent in museums and institutions remains in focus.

The discovery that Durham would have been my neighbour in London, where I am presently based, prompts consideration of my own position, as a subjective and diasporic researcher, in a diasporic archive. My close looking and attention to detail become interventions, and gestures of care towards that which, for so long, has been neglected. Simultaneously, I notice the presence of the word ‘beloved’ in the accounts I read.

What does it mean that these foreigners might travel more freely, might know, and experience hospitality as I may never, as a result of my own particular background? What does it mean to be between gazes, to be born, to live, and to work in one place, to see gaze projected? Fundamentally, these are questions of what it means to relate to a place that is so othered, so exoticised, and cared for only when media and public gaze is shifted. Before Traditional jewellery and dress from the Balkans, the most substantial exhibitions of Balkan art and textiles had taken place in the 1940s, and 1990s, within the context of wars.40

I consider the presence of Palestinian textile exhibitions in Britain today.

***

At this juncture, it is critical to consider these perspectives in conversation with more contemporary anthropologists in the region. Vera Stein Erlich (1897-1980) was born in Zagreb, a city then in the south of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As an individual of Croatian and Jewish heritage, she may be assumed to bring a particular sensibility to her practice. Nevertheless, it was her pursuit of education elsewhere—first in psychology, in Vienna and Berlin—that sharpened her ethnographic approach to Yugoslavia, a place which she described as simultaneously ‘East and West, traditional and modern…backward and progressive…’41

Whilst acknowledging the co-existence of both ‘primeval and modern conditions of life’ across the region, it was the former that captured her attention and focus. Her survey of Muslim, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox communities in the 1940s became, as she later observed, ‘a film of forms of life that were soon to disappear’, with the coming of civil war and socialist revolution, transformations often marginalised within the singular representation of World War II in Europe. This research manifested in the formative text Porodica u transformaciji — Studija u tri stotine jugoslavenskih sela (1964), published in English as Family in Transition: A study of 300 Yugoslav villages (1966), the most extensive anthropological analysis of pre-war Yugoslavia. The British Library in London holds a copy of the 1966 translation, and a second, enlarged edition, published in 1971. So too does the British Museum, its copy discharged from and donated by the RAI.

Of the 32 photographs in the text, only four were likely taken by Erlich herself—Bosnian Peasants in the Field (4), Man from Bosnia (5), Potter in the Lika area, Croatia (7), and Croatian Women (11). Even this is uncertain, a process of deduction from the acknowledgements, which number the copyrighted photographs taken by two internationally renowned art photographers—and men—based in Zagreb, Tošo Dabac (1907-1970) and Mladen Grčević (1918-2012).42

Erlich’s choice of photographers, and photographs, was more likely informed by availability, rather than artistic interest. Her choices were, nevertheless, remarkable. Grčević contributed to the regional development of the practice, through his own practice, texts including Art Photography in Croatia 1891–1940. The Phenomenon of the Zagreb School (1955), and public, critical responses to exhibitions such as The Family of Man (1955-1958). Grčević’s exhibition in Zagreb in May 1944 was the only solo exhibition held in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), established as a satellite of the Third Reich in the spring of 1941. Following the end of the wars in Yugoslavia, in 1948, he participated in a photography exhibition in Zagreb with others including Tošo Dabac and Marijan Szabo, the only participants that were also members of the main art association, the Croatian Association of Fine Artists (ULUH).43

Dabac worked on different publications throughout his career, including for foreign news agencies, and as a translator and press officer for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s subsidiary in Zagreb. From his first exhibition in Ivanec in 1933, he was considered part of a community that contributed to the development of art photography in the region, in part through the publication of Galerija, a local language edition of the European art photography magazine Die Galerie.44

Unlike other photographers and artists of his generation, Dabac’s practice was deeply connected to the region. Apart from a major trip to the Mediterranean in 1932, he did not work outside of Yugoslavia.45 He remains best known for his black-and-white photographs of Zagreb street life during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and for his month of photographs and diary entries from Istria, which captured the region’s ‘post-war’ economic conditions, in 1945.

On a single page in Family in Transition—109—bears three photographs, taken by the three photographers, of markets in Bosnia, Croatia, and Montenegro. Save for the differences in dress, they could be mistaken for different perspectives on a same scene, indeed, the work of the same photographer. To challenge disciplinary boundaries, then, what makes Grčević and Dabac’s projects more photographic or artistic, where Erlich, Hasluck, and Durham’s are social and anthropological?

For Erlich, it is clear that the image is simply illustrative of her text— the written word, like the object in the collection, has primacy. The photographs are placed alongside tables, graphs, and charts, accounting the ‘loyalty of husband to sister and wife’ by number, illustrating the extent to which ‘parents beat children much.’ No further context or explanation is offered about the photographs, save for a caption, a few words which reduces the subjects and sitters to a national type.

‘About the Pictures’ in her text, she writes:

The photographs included in this book show people from different regions, with the bearing, gestures, and costumes of the patriarchal era. The pictures are documents of a bygone time, since these costumes and also partly the expressions of the people have disappeared to a great extent in most parts of Yugoslavia. Like the reports of my interviewers, the pictures caught their subjects at the very last moment,before the storms of history spoiled their style. Their beauty, grown through centuries, disappeared in a few years under the blows of enemy occupation and fighting during the Second World War and the onrush of the machine era.46

Erlich’s practice invites consideration of positionality, as much as representation. Through her education and relative privilege, she perhaps shared more in common with Durham and Hasluck than her ‘fellow’ countrywomen. In the preface to Family in Transition, she writes that her ‘school project’:

…began in Zagreb in 1937, when a group of student friends suggested that I write for the Yugoslav press series of articles on the position of Moslem [Muslim] women. The students were bitter about the “enslavement” of their sisters who had been married in the traditional manner. I was not very enthusiastic about attacking the women’s veil or the lattice window, but I was willing to study and report on Bosnian family life.47

Erlich’s inquiry quickly extended, as fellow ethnologists and sociologists soon began to share similar accounts of ‘bride purchase’ and ‘bride abduction’ in Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia.48 Invitations from students, teachers, doctors, and judges—predominantly men—in remote villages soon followed.49 Erlich, like Durham, was aware of the gendered nature of these encounters, and explicitly described her project’s becoming ‘the last record of the patriarchal social system which was about to crumble.’50 It is ambiguous, the extent to which she perceives this process as positive or negative, her accounts tinged with nostalgia for a Yugoslavia that no longer existed.

Erlich not only shared in Durham’s vision of documenting ‘the last tribal system in Europe,’ but in methods and process.51 What was at stake in Durham, Hasluck, and Erlich’s lives informed their approaches to their work. Erlich, as a ‘Yugoslav’ working in Yugoslavia on the precipice of war, struggled to gain access, often completing her work with the excuse of collecting data on venereal diseases for the Institute of Hygiene.52

Indeed, all of these anthropologists, including Hasluck, share a background in humanitarian work during the major wars in Europe which, crucially, also permitted them access to their subjects. During World War II, Erlich worked as an UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) social worker in southern Italy.53 Whilst working with Yugoslav refugees, she continued to collect material on their pre-war family lives, comparing the accounts of the refugees with the surveys she had already gathered.54 It is unclear whether she ever maintained contact or relation following the publication of the text, following the ‘end’ of the wars, and in diasporic contexts; her questions remain unanswered:

Were these folk going to behave abroad, in wartime, as my studies showed? Would they remain true to the styles I had found when they were still welded in the framework of the family?

Following the wars in the 1940s, Erlich moved to the United States, where she received a doctorate in anthropology and worked as a lecturer at the University of California. This experience informed her transnational, comparative, and cross-cultural approach to anthropology, which she practiced on her return to Zagreb in the early 1960s. She writes very little, however, about the relation between the central University of Belgrade, from where she was often sent, and the places she visited in the former Yugoslavia. There is a short critical interrogation as to why these ‘excited’ men so willingly volunteered their communities, in a sort of minority show-and-tell. ‘This is where you can see archaic life!’, one boast, suggests that the invitation was less based on the welcome and consent of the communities, and more some form of gross self-othering. This raises the ethical responsibility of those who choose to and are capable of communicating and representing communities for other publics—a responsibility that involves anthropologists as Erlich, artists as Knežević, and writers, as the author of this text, in diasporic contexts alike.

***

Of all the instruments at these anthropologists’ disposal, the camera is scarcely mentioned. The Appendices of Erlich’s Family in Transition, which further detail ‘The Method Used,’ make no mention of photography. Though she names all of her interviewers and surveyed villages—where they consented, and the records survived—the subjects of the images remain unnamed, anonymised, as previously observed in the practices of Durham and Hasluck. The close shots, often of particular trades or practices, reflect the images’ more documentary purpose.

Erlich’s intent coheres with—and reinforces—the institutional logic of collection. Above the camera, she prioritises paper questionnaires and coloured pencils used to graph ‘statistical results,’ suggesting a pursuit of objectivity typical of anthropological practice.55 This treatment of subjective and particular lived experiences—as a means to an end—is evident in her approach, as she describes ‘cross-examining’ her subjects to check her own research. Erlich describes the transformation of her findings into factual material, her effort to condense the ‘excess … and the emotional nature of the reports…to an objective common denominator…[I] assembled and analyzed my matter, drew graphs, and calculated percentages’.56

Perhaps the anthropological ambivalence toward photography reflects an ambivalence toward the medium itself, as a form of instant documentation. Durham and Erlich deliberated over their representations—whether in watercolour paintings, or the drawing of graphs. This slower, more attentive mode of looking may have held greater significance for Durham, though should not be separated, as artistic forms of visual representation.

From the black-and-white of the RAI emerge images of vivid orange and blue, some of which were taken by Captain Evan MacRury. These images include representations of Tosks (and perhaps also Ghegs), ethnic subgroups of Albanians, and other ethnic minorities described as ‘tribesmen’. A page of photographs by ‘Mrs. Tuck’, taken before Durham’s first journey, offers no further information about the photographer.

Beyond the British Museum, many more images presently exist only in the written form. In his account of Durham’s articles and letters related to Albania, Harry Hodgkinson writes fleetingly of a ‘touching, idyllic picture’ of King Nikola of Montenegro, by Emily, Viscountess or Lady Strangford (1826-1887).57 For his part, Nikola had engaged Durham, as Commissioner, in the representation of Montenegro in the Balkan States Exhibition held at Earl’s Court in London in 1907.58 Durham presented thirty sepia print photographs, illustrating the antiquities, costume, and scenery of Montenegro, alongside eighteen watercolour paintings of the landscape or ‘scenery’, and other representations by British artists and travellers.59 A number of the photographic postcards from the display remain in the Bankfield Museum collection. As a selling exhibition, many more works might remain elsewhere in Britain.

This instance of Durham’s curatorial work brought her to the attention of the RAI, of which she became a Fellow in 1908.60 Here she was connected with the likes of Professor Sir William Ridgeway, Fellow and President (1908-1910)—who, for his part, collected material from both Durham and (Frederick) Hasluck, a point of connection between the two anthropologists.61 A deeper reading of such exhibitions, which shared their colonial approach with Great Exhibitions, World’s Fairs, and later, Expos—exposes the gazes of their subjects, as much as their organisers and publics. In the case of those visiting from Montenegro:

The Montenegrins were appalled how, in capitalist London, men did not appear to realise that it is not consonant with masculine dignity to engage in anything so humiliating as work. And when they saw the natives working as blacksmiths they could only conclude that the English were a nation of gypsies.62

Hodgkinson implies a western/European ‘tendency—this psychological need, if you like—to [the] idealisation’ of Albania, to which Durham was party ‘despite her down-to-earth character.’63 This essentialising perspective undermines the agency of Durham and her contemporaries. Other British anthropologists and academics, who were generally more supportive of the Serbs, also criticised Durham. Author Rebecca West described Durham as the sort of traveller who came back ‘with a pet Balkan people established in their hearts as suffering and innocent, eternally the massacree and never the massacrer.’64 In her own writing, she also deferred to artistic representations, in the evocation of stereotypes:

The Bulgarians, as preferred by some, and the Albanians, as championed by others, strongly resembled Sir Joshua Reynolds”s picture of the Infant Samuel.65

Durham worked with an awareness of the media, and through her artistic practice. Indeed, the majority of the photographs in the RAI collection are categorised as ‘genre’, but a few are considered as ‘art works’. These are photographs where Durham intervened by hand with paint to enhance the shadow or little, a common practice to prepare an image for mass printing.66 Following Alexandre Ken, and later, Suren Lalvani, the process of retouching highlights that which is missing or absent from the first shot, and further detaches the image from its context and real subject.67 Indeed, the treatment of the Durham photographs reflects the continued marginalisation of women, on the basis of medium, methods of research, and gender:

In the 1900s, of course, public opinion did not have the advantage of the present-day circus of cameramen and observers, politicians and negotiators, who follow the circuit of successive crises. And the task of keeping it informed devolved on devoted and experienced individuals: journalists like the legendary J.D. Bourchier of The Times in Bulgaria, and amateur travellers of intelligence and courage like Edith Durham.68

It should be questioned which kinds of experience merited Bouchier above Durham. One review of her collective—and incomplete—anthropological works in print, Some Tribal Origins, Laws and Customs of the Balkans (1928), reinforce the importance of her own lived experience. ‘She can hardly be described as a systematic anthropologist in the academic sense; her books are replete with the raw materials, the stuff and matter of ethnology and folklore, and are a mine of information of great value to these sciences. As an authority in the field, she probably had no rival.’69

A contemporary encounter with these images, then, should not only question dominant narratives in the present, but those dominant within the context of their making. They have an instrumental function in verifying and challenging accounts, and thus, the predominance of text. For instance, written accounts of Durham’s travels emphasise her arrival in Kotor, present-day Montenegro; In her first collection at the British Museum, from The Burden of the Balkans, Dalmatia is excluded altogether. Montenegro was particularly popular at the time, perceived as ‘exotic but welcoming’:

Here, for the classically minded, was a race of Homeric warriors, wild in appearance – with even a touch of Rousseau’s Noble Savage, perhaps—but not unamenable to the gold sovereigns and napoleons and kroner of the tourist.70

Photographs and postcards from Bankfield Museum in Halifax, however, suggest that Durham’s voyage likely first stopped in Dalmatia, the Adriatic coastal region of my mother’s birth. As the aforementioned account continues, those who travelled by the Lloyd Triestino cruise liner would ‘thread[ing] the Roman ruins and Venetian campanili on route, wondering at Zara [Zadar] whether to sip Ulahovi’s maraschino or Lycardo’. Following her images, however, Durham seemed to have paid closer attention to the boats docked at Adriatic points, adorned with a carved eye, to ‘guide the way’. Most would have carried the guide issued by the Union of the Encouragement of Local Economic Initiatives of Royal Dalmatia—600 pages, eight volumes—including details of ‘an Optional Excursion into Montenegro’, which Durham selected.71

Though in full command of ‘Serbo-Croat’, Durham never ‘mastered’ the Albanian language, in part a result of its different, competing alphabets. The author of this account, Harry Hodgkinson, describes these alphabets as ‘positively hieroglyphic,’ in another instance of temporal othering and orientalisation. In this context, Durham’s images—as a visual language, and mode of communication—are thus even more important. Though we may not be able to determine if and how her images were perceived by the sitters and subjects in Albania then, through exhibition and display, we may learn and make many more accounts in the present.

***

The language of photography—and ‘shooting’—reflects the connection between the medium and forms of violence.72 In these three cases, the shots of the camera and the mass violence of conflict are intimately related, both in their wartime content and context, and the intent of the photographers to protect or preserve that which is at risk of loss. In the context of the destruction of land, people, communities, and cultural heritage during the civil wars of the 1990s, these British collections have ‘preserved’ Yugoslavia—a country that no longer exists—beyond the borders of space and time.

In the colonisation of African societies by European powers, photography served many purposes, including the categorisation and commodification of people to reinforce social hierarchies. Whilst embracing the plural legacies of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires in Europe, as discussed, all three anthropologists reinforced certain ethnic and racial differences including through photography, contributing to the construction and perpetuation of types.

As Chiara Bonglioni suggests, Erlich attempted to explain many customs in relation to imperial legacies, wars and conflicts, and the shift towards market economics, rather than essential cultural or religious differences.73 Beyond Dabac, the industrial transformation of Yugoslavia was sensitively photographed by Milan Pavić (1914-1986), in black-and-white images of everyday life in the 1950s, of workers and new factories, and people on islands of the Adriatic coast. Pavić’s images are clearly and carefully composed, and beautiful, affording the same attention and respect to each context of his practice. Erlich’s own distinction between ‘modern’ and ‘old style’ areas in Yugoslavia, though binary, was perhaps less hierarchical than that of her peers, without orientalisation or suggestion of western/European cultural superiority.

These ways of seeing persist, and shape experiences of conflict, displacement, and trauma. The continued White (Other)ing74 of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European identities has been challenged through contemporary art. In the public art project Bosnian Girl (2003), artist Šejla Kamerić layers derogatory graffiti by an unknown Dutch UN soldier over her own enlarged image. The text, found at an army barracks in Srebrenica during the wars in Bosnia (1992–1995), reflects the persistence of patriarchal structures—contrary to the demise Erlich foretold by Erlich. In this act of self-portraiture, she suggests how women become representatives of national identity, their bodies politicised to stand—or fall—for territories and borders. In her gaze, staring directly at the camera, she demands the viewer’s accountability for their own ways of looking, for their role in systems of prejudice and ignorance.

Though grounded in her particular experiences of the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Kamerić’s image has been used in respect to the experiences of women in conflicts across the world. Thinking with Kamerić’s work prompts further consideration of the political stances of these anthropologists. In her later years, Durham was strongly criticised by advocates of a Yugoslav state, both in Yugoslavia and its diasporas, who supported the incorporation of the Albanian-populated region of Kosovo into Yugoslavia. Her eccentric personality, active lobbying, and anti-Serb position made her disliked by the British government and Foreign Office.75 Their distaste was certainly gendered; within this century, she has been described again as a ‘difficult woman’.76

Hasluck briefly worked for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a British governmental organisation, during World War II. As a staunch anti-communist, she resigned from her position when the British government moved their support from the Royal Yugoslav Army (JV) to the Partisans led by Josip Broz Tito, perceived as the most effective resistance against the Nazis.77

Erlich writes about the race to complete her publication against ‘an oncoming flood’ of fascism, and her own miraculous survival.78 In her flight through Yugoslavia, she had managed to carry the suitcase containing her surveys to date from Nazi-occupied Zagreb, through Italian-occupied Dalmatia, over the karst mountains to the island of Vis, the headquarters of the Partisans. The suitcase, stowed away in a cellar, was later dispatched to her place of refuge in southern Italy, and became the foundation of Family in Transition.

A critical article by Savka Andic published in 2025, featuring some of the first reproductions of the photographs in the text, was temporarily removed from public access as a result of the cyber-attack at the British Library. It has, only recently, returned online in the form of a low resolution screenshot (the photographs were first photographed, rather than scanned, from the text). The position of this particular research reflects not only Erlich’s precarious position, but the precarity of the institution itself.

The photographs from Erlich’s text are not held nor observed with the likes of Durham or Hasluck, nor any of the aforementioned practitioners. Together, such perspectives could expose and challenge such a singular ‘gaze’ of Britain and western/Europe on the region. Over time, they highlight continuities between the Balkan Wars and World War I, World War II, and the Yugoslav Wars, that are necessary to understand the continuation of conflict and violence today, and to move beyond the event. They also speculate more complex relations between Albania, Kosovo, and Serbia, and thus present an opportunity to engage with underrepresented, often marginalised diasporic communities who live in Britain, local to these collections. Yet in their current position, they represent lingering prejudices, similarly underdeveloped and hidden in plain sight.

***

I do not propose the restitution of these images, nor objects, to their places of origin.79 Unlike sculptures, artworks, and devotional objects trafficked from colonial African countries, they were largely purchased or gifted. By entering, and living, in collections across Britain, over time, they have become diasporic objects.80 As discussed, presently constituted, these collections and accounts, as West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, are more revelatory of contemporary perspectives in Britain than in the Balkans.

In the first instance, though, I do call for their freer movement within the borders of their own institutions. Beyond temporary exhibitions, displays, or loans, the Durham photographs at the British Museum could exist in a number of other places. The Durham photographs at the British Museum could exist in a number of other places. We might imagine them with the silver coin of the bust of Milan Obrenović IV, former Prince (1868-1882) and King (1882-1889) of Serbia, currently kept in the Department of Money and Models, or an 1896 rendering of Queen Natalija Obrenović, which can be located in Prints and Drawings. Durham writes of both, and the succession histories of Serbia, in Twenty Years of Balkan Tangle (1920). This coming together would raise interesting questions about the viability, as much of visibility, of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Moving forwards, we might read in Durham’s images a deep interest in the natural environment. The titles of her texts imply the plurality of ‘lands,’ and the singularity of people (‘the Serb’). Many drawings, photographs, and written descriptions of Durmitor, one of the highest points in Montenegro, begin her first scrapbook, MY BALKAN NOTEBOOK VOLUME I, reflecting its primary interest.

Following the loose chronology of the archive, we encounter places through the seasons, most strikingly, the snow-covered mountains and valleys in spring. The reverse of one slide shows not a photograph, but a pasted rendering or drawing, perhaps the karst landscape. It is reminiscent of abstract works by Zoran Mušič (1909-2005) also held in the Department of Prints and Drawings. Durham again, though, slips from view.

In the process of excavating the Durham photographs, the institution encounters more materials. Three boxes of slides from a research visit, or perhaps a holiday, appear, through close study against a lightbox. We suppose the year is 1959, for one of the first images, the ‘Unspoilt Adriatic!’ of Podgora, on the Dalmatian coast of present-day Croatia. Less picturesque scenes emerge.

As in Durham’s collections, the photographer’s notes are vital. From North Macedonia, they soon travel to Prilep in Kosovo; the note ‘Serbia’ on one slide is the only indication that prevents the viewer today mistaking the landscapes of this volcanic, ‘earthquake country’ for the city of the same name in North Macedonia.

Though their spelling isn’t perfect, most place names are identifiable. The purpose of their journey, and destinations, however, remains unclear. What brings together the ruins of Stari Bar and Stobi, with the women’s mosque in Novi Pazar, in southwestern Serbia?. The figure ‘Dowden’ is ascribed to many of the slides. Another, named ‘Phil’, appears buying an apron in Struga Market, Ohrid, and on the beaten track between Mavrovo and Galičnik in North Macedonia. They offer no clues about the traveller or their companion. We can suppose these slides were used for studies or lectures, but they are not named, not catalogued, and not known. Perhaps Durham’s photographs could share in the ambiguity afforded to these slides as ‘non-objects,’ materials which are kept by the Museum but not accessioned or formally part of the collection.

Photographs and photographic material have a strange status throughout the British Museum’s collections, something which certainly demands further study. These particular unrecorded slides—like the negatives—are physically present absences within these institutions. Absence, however, is not exclusively negative. Following Peggy Phelan, visibility does not automatically equal power. Visibility can also lead to capture and the loss of opacity.81 Through performance art, Phelan refuses the fetish of visibility that risks turning art into content to be consumed. In our contemporary context, this approach could apply to images and objects that were not created as visual artworks, but documentation, too.

To resist the impulse to consider these images as artworks does not necessarily mean to resist the impulse of curation, taking the verb literally, as a form of taking care of the sitters and subjects they depict. The document—here the photograph or negative—plays a critical role in the politics of memory. In its absence, there is a space that allows for thinking beyond the existing logics of the institution. By existing through disappearance, performance and time-based mediums create space with potential for the realisation of subjectivity, beyond that which seems predetermined. A performative response to absence—whether of the physical object, or the unrecorded stories of the subjects—could be more constructive for the present, than efforts to recover what has been lost to record-keeping, cataloguing, and time.

It is a different experience to encounter absence in the photographic archive today. Working with the context of the Iraq War, Alain Badiou considers that the first ethical act is to acknowledge the ‘not-seeing’ produced by the bombardment of images in the media. This operates as a regime of visibility, which authorises what may be visible, while consigning the rest to non-existence, and politically insignificance, through invisibility.”82 In/visibility is thus not a binary, but a logic and set of lenses that can determine what may appear.

This particular encounter with Durham’s images is an exercise in beginning from this position, of ‘not-seeing’. It is a pursuit of truths in the traces, fragments, and losses of these images and collections more widely. In this sense, the encounter—or Azoulay’s event— is itself a form of evidence. My position, intervention, and reinterpretations of these archives are also ‘contemporary practices’ in history writing. My photocopying becomes a photographic act.

Acknowledging the ethnographic aspect of all photographic practice is essential to understanding the greater impact of photography upon history, culture, and aesthetics. My own encounter is mediated—and only possible—through this collection being in Britain, through the archivists and curators who facilitate my access. Durham and Hasluck enjoyed a disproportionate status as foreigners in the Balkans. As Robert Wilton writes, the places which bear memorials of these women:

haven’t lacked for impressive women of their own, but in an enduringly patriarchal and socially conservative world, they’ve struggled to claim autonomous roles, let alone have impact and drive change. Wars of ethnic identity have long relegated the struggles for social equality. In Durham’s time, women such as Staka Skenderova in Bosnia and Marija Jurić Zagorka in Croatia were fighting lonely and protracted campaigns for girls’ education and women’s rights (and indeed women’s writing). Kosovo’s extraordinary Shote Galica is celebrated as a warrior but requires excuses to be made for her lack of femininity. A Serbian or Albanian woman anthropologist would not have been able to visit and represent Serbian and Albanian villages as Durham did, benefiting from their legendary highland hospitality; her inappropriateness was excused as foreignness.83

This context continues to inform others’ efforts to research today, not only in the presence of these partial historical accounts, but poor cataloguing practices, restricted access to funding for research, and now, funding cuts. ‘Unfortunately it was not possible for the author to view collections in storage, due to building work and staff shortages,’ is a frequent refrain in Philippa Mackenzie’s research published over thirty years prior to this article, that resounds in the present institutional context.84

Durham’s Kodak Brownie camera is yet to be located in any of these collections. I look for Durham herself, but first encounter false finds. I am guided by one of the clearest photographs of the anthropologist, taken at the studio of the youngest child of Julia Margaret Cameron, at 70 Mortimer Street, near the British Museum.85 Durham appears only once, at the end of the final album in two consecutive photographs. In the first, she sits on a small black horse, her profile in shadow beneath her hat. In the second, she faces the camera directly.

The photographer is not recorded.