Peasants, Photography and Citizenship: An Exercise in Re-Framing Social Imagination in the Polish Lands in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The article analyzes the relationship between citizenship of peasants and photography in the Polish lands in the nineteenth century, using the perspective of potential history (A. A. Azoulay). The purpose of the article is twofold. The first step is to show how photography supported the process of separating the upper classes from the peasants and prevented villagers from being thought of as (present and future) citizens. The second one demonstrates various attempts to “re-frame” the existing reality, i.e. to reunite in one photographic frame what had previously been separated, which was tantamount to imagining a different social order, an order based on cocitizenship. The analyzed material includes mainly photographs and, as contextual sources, paintings from the Kingdom of Poland and Galicia.