Photographic Meadow: Visual Archives in the Making of Ecological Memory and Land-Care Knowledge

Project description:

Photographic Meadow is an interdisciplinary research project centred on the anthropological analysis of Carpathian meadows as historically, ecologically, and culturally layered landscapes, examined through systematic work with visual data. Grounded in environmental and visual anthropology and developed in dialogue with botany and geography, the project investigates what kinds of knowledge about biodiversity, land care, and long-term landscape change can be reconstructed and elicited from archival and contemporary visual sources.

The core of the project consists of a systematic analysis of ethnographic photographic archives (primarily the collections of the Institute of Ethnology and Social Anthropology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, including documentation linked to the research of Ján Podolák and subsequent generations of scholars), combined with historical and contemporary aerial and satellite imagery. These visual materials are approached not as illustrative supplements but as full-fledged epistemic media that convey ecological memory and make visible long-term transformations of human–more-than-human relations in meadow landscapes.

Anthropological analysis focuses on visually legible traces of past and present land-use practices (mowing, grazing, succession), spatial patterns of care, maintenance, and neglect, and the ways in which meadow biodiversity becomes culturally perceived, interpreted, and valued. Methodologically, the project combines visual and archival analysis, sensoryanthropological approaches to visual elicitation, botanical interpretation of vegetation indicators, and geographical analyses of landscape change.

The project will result in an anthropologically grounded analytical framework for working with visual archives in environmental research, enabling the integration of historical ethnographic documentation with contemporary debates on biodiversity, land care, and the regeneration of cultural landscapes in the Carpathian region.

Project aims:

The main objective of the project Phomea: The Photographic Meadow is to analyse Carpathian grasslands as historically, ecologically, and culturally layered landscapes through visual data, and to examine how archival and contemporary visuality mediates ecological memory, landscape care, and long-term transformations of landscape regimes.

1. To examine the epistemic potential of visual data—ethnographic photography, archival aerial imagery, and contemporary satellite data—for identifying long-term changes in biodiversity, land-use practices, and landscape structures of Carpathian grasslands.
2. To analyse archival photographic collections within the frameworks of environmental anthropology and historical ethnography in order to reconstruct visual traces of meadow management and to identify continuities and discontinuities in landscape use over time.
3. To integrate anthropological interpretations of visual materials with botanical and geographical knowledge of grassland ecosystems and to develop an interdisciplinary analytical framework for the study of semi-natural cultural landscapes.
4. To develop the concept of meadow ecological memory as an analytical tool for examining relationships between humans, landscape, and biodiversity in the context of long-term ecological change.
5. To contribute to methodological innovation in environmental and visual anthropology through systematic engagement with visual archives, aerial photography, and satellite-based Earth observation data.
6. To design and implement a multimodal anthropological dissemination strategy combining: (1) a curated exhibition, (2) public workshops and discussions, and (3) an online photographic database (Phomea – The Photo-Ecological Memory of Meadows).
7. To communicate meadow ecological memory, biodiversity, and forms of landscape care through visually grounded, interdisciplinary interpretation, with the aim of strengthening ecological literacy and fostering dialogue between researchers, conservation practitioners, farmers, educators, and the wider public.
8. To establish an open, sustainable online photographic database as a long-term visual research infrastructure enabling analytical, educational, and comparative work with photographs in temporal and thematic perspectives, and linking local meadow knowledge to broader transdisciplinary frameworks, particularly in the areas of One Health, environmental risk, and human–animal–landscape relations.