Fotografia în mentalul românesc interbelic. Note de arheologie intelectuală

This article aims to contribute to the understanding of how photography was perceived in interwar Romania. Given the scarcity of direct references, we attempted a reconstruction based on literary, memoir, and journalistic sources. The idea was inspired by the numerous literary references (from Balzac to Proust) found in theoretical writings about photography, and, specifically, by the plea of literary critic Paul Cernat for "following the narrative implications of photography" in Romanian prose. We did not go that far, limiting ourselves to identifying and signalling occurrences of photography that can shed light on how it was conceived in the period. We primarily considered "canonical" authors, such as Camil Petrescu, Liviu Rebreanu, Garabet Ibrăileanu, Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu, Tudor Arghezi, Mircea Eliade, and others like Mihail Sebastian, Ionel Teodoreanu, and Cezar Petrescu. The primary function of photography was considered by most to be that of preserving memories, an aide-mémoire. Much of the photographic output of the time was studio-based, covering private, family aspects. Arrangements (false attitudes of subjects, typical theatrical props/scenic elements) were often noticed, because of which the function was realized poorly. However, a photograph was not only seen as a means of "conserving" the past, bringing it back to memory, but also of showing it to others. It therefore also had a socializing function, which today we would call a distribution function. The private became public in various degrees, depending on the manner and frequency of distribution. A substantial space is dedicated to the eventfulness of photography, also in various degrees, whether it was associated with an event, in relation to which it tended to become autonomous, or whether it represented an event in itself. In any situation, it produced a behavioural modification of the referent, thus affecting its presumed ability to faithfully render reality. Finally, we attempted a review of the reflections on photography in the Romanian intellectual space, starting with Eminescu and considering Iorga, Blaga, Rebreanu, Arghezi, and others. The opinions regarding it can be considered simplistic today, oscillating between confidence and distrust in its capacity to render reality. The most nuanced approach is that of G. Călinescu – probably the Romanian author most attracted to photography – who believed that truth could be expressed not through the technique itself, but through an intervention to realize the photographer's vision. We also showed that the photography-reality tension in the collective mindset is also noticeable at the terminological level, through the semantic evolution of the word “pose”, which initially meant “attitude” / “affectation” but, over time, became synonymous with “photography”. Paradoxically, the metonymy occurred contrary to historical evolution. “Pose”, a term associated with the static, the artificial, and the false, became synonymous with “photography” during the period when the phenomenon was becoming increasingly dynamic, natural, and realistic.