Eugenie Goldstern Photographic Collection – Research-Oriented Ethnographic Photography

The photographic estate of Eugenie Goldstern (1883/84–1942), preserved at the Volkskundemuseum Wien, comprises around 470 photographs and ranks among the early visual records of ethnographic fieldwork. Between 1913 and 1921, Goldstern documented architecture, everyday life, and material culture in the Alpine regions of France, Austria, and Switzerland. Complemented by photographs from Egypt and Eastern Europe, her images reflect the transition from collecting practices to a more scientific and respectful mode of observation at a time when folklore studies remained strongly shaped by normative and hierarchical perspectives. Approximately two-thirds of the photographs in the collection were taken by Goldstern herself – an exceptionally high proportion that attests to the active photographic practice of this pioneering ethnologist, who was murdered in 1942 as a victim of Nazi persecution in the Sobibor extermination camp. After decades of neglect, Goldstern’s photographic estate was fully catalogued, conserved, and made digitally accessible beginning in 2018. Today, the collection is available through the Online Collection Plus together with her publications, archival materials, and literature on her life and work, providing for the first time a comprehensive resource for the study of her methods, biography, and the history of ethnographic research.

Merely a Means to an End? The Early Negatives of the Volkskundemuseum Wien

The first 1,500 entries in the negative inventory – predominantly glass plates – depict ‘the rural’ in the Alpine and Danube regions between 1900 and 1938: farmhouses, village squares, traditional costumes, and sacred objects. Produced by museum staff and regional specialists, they reflect the research interests and visual aesthetics of their time. Many negatives were created as reproductions of positive images or as excerpts from publications. They served for the production of prints, slides, and printed illustrations and were long regarded merely as a means to an end. Today, however, they are increasingly valued as material objects in their own right, particularly in research contexts: retouchings, interventions, material deterioration, and traces of storage become visible in color digitizations, opening up new insights for a range of disciplines.

Embroidery Patterns

The pattern sheets for canvas embroidery in the collection of the Volkskundemuseum Wien (Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art) offer a glimpse into the diversity of motifs found in embroidery patterns, which have been mass-produced since the Biedermeier period. In the 19th century, there was a seemingly endless selection of figurative, floral, and ornamental patterns available on pattern paper. The embroidery patterns were used by women of the upper classes for their needlework as a leisure activity befitting their social standing in social gatherings, but also by embroiderers who had to earn their living with them.

The museum’s collection consists of approximately 200 embroidery patterns for canvas embroidery. These are individual sheets in a wide variety of formats, the majority of which are hand-colored dot patterns. The embroidery patterns mostly originate from the offerings of well-known publishers and art dealers in Vienna and Berlin. This article focuses particularly on the sheets from the first half of the 19th century.