Paper short abstract:

The paper presents an anthropological analysis of the social use of vernacular photographs among people with refugee experience. What are the ways in which photography affects people with refugee experience? How do photographs create new material surroundings and how it save the cultural identity?

Paper long abstract:

The military action in Ukraine provoked by the Russian invasion have forced some 7-10 million residents of Ukraine to leave the country. Since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion, saving themselves from the war, more than 5 million people have sheltered in Poland. Within 11 months of the ongoing war, some people have decided to return to Ukraine, others, with nowhere to return to, are trying to repair their lives in a new socio-cultural context. The photos, along with other personal items "thrown" into the so-called "emergency bag" have a special place in the lives of their owners, giving feeling of connection to family and/or close persons, society.

My propose a paper is a kind of reaction to the current situation. In the everyday life, photographs accompany people in various ways. Moreover, they are social actors and have the potential to enter into dynamic interactions with people. As Elizabeth Edwards has noted, objects, including photographs, are therefore not only a scenography for human actions and meanings, but are part of their (Edwards, Hart, 2011). According to my anthropological observations, in situations involving the necessity to leave the country, photographs are often the objects that have a place among the personal belongings necessary for evacuation. Taken from their original context of functioning, they get a new life, they travel in the company of other objects with which they had no contact so far, they appropriate the space of a temporary home, become mediators in communication with, for example, family.