Hugo Bernatzik

Hugo Adolf Bernatzik (26 March 1897 – 9 March 1953, born and died in the city of Vienna), was an Austrian anthropologist and photographer. Bernatzik was the founder of the concept of alternative anthropology.[1]

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Biography

Benatzik was the son of a government lawyer in Vienna at the turn of the nineteenth century. During the First World War he enlisted in the Austro-Hungarian army at eighteen and went to fight to Albania in 1915. Later he abandoned his medical studies and began to travel carrying a cumbersome camera wherever he went. His first trip was to Spain and the Maghreb in 1924. With Prof. Bernhard Struck of the Dresden Museum of Ethnology he travelled to Egypt, Southern Sudan and Somalia in 1927. After returning he studied ethnology, geography and psychology in Vienna.

Over the span of his career Bernatzik undertook research in and photographed, amongst others, people and landscapes in certain areas of tropical Africa, like the Bissagos Islands (1930–1931), as well as the Solomon Islands (1932), New Guinea and Bali (1933), and Southeast Asia (1936–1937). He became a lecturer at the University of Graz in 1939. During those years he was a member of the Nazi Party, a party he had joined even before the Anschluss. After the war was over, Bernatzik travelled to Morocco, Romania, the Balkans and Lappland. He had had a book published in 1937 called Lapland which was an enthological and geographical study of the area of Norway, Sweden and Finland inhabited by the Såpmi. It is significant that the Nazis used detailed knowledge and photographs of the areas taken immediately prior to the war in their invasion plans and indeed organised such trips to obtain detailed information before formulating those plans.

Bernatzik fell seriously ill in Morocco during what would be his last trip. With difficulty he returned to his home city, Vienna, where he died in 1953 at the age of fifty-six.

Photographic work

Bernatzik financed his journeys with journalism and by selling his photographs. While most of his photographic subjects fall within what has been labelled, and often dismissed, as "ethnographic nudity", Bernatzik insisted that he documented the daily life of cultures that were in the process of dying owing to contact with the modern world.[2]

Unfortunately most of his belongings, including a great number of his valuable original negatives, some of them never published, were destroyed by fire in Austria during the Second World War.

Ethnographic works

See also

Bibliography and References

  1. ^ Bordonaro, Lorenzo Ibrahim, Living at the margins. Youth and modernity in the Bijagó Islands (Guinea-Bissau)
  2. ^ Hugo A. Bernatzik, Südsee- Expedition in die Südsee (Solomon, Papua & Trobriand) 1944