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.
This article will be published in English soon.