Rural Temporalities

Positions of Realism Between Social Documentary and National Photography in Central Europe

Abstract

The rural has long functioned as antithesis to the urban as the location of modernity. One of the defining elements of this dichotomy is the different temporalities they relate to, which mark the urban as fast-paced and technologically driven, while the rural appears slow, even “timeless”. In 1930s Czechoslovakia, however, an array of different realisms, defined by their value as a social record, was inscribed in the countryside through photography and film. Exploring the tensions arising in this space in the work of Irena Blühová and Karol Plicka, this essay argues that the fusing of urban and rural temporalities played a defining role in constructions of competing rural realisms. It takes the rural/urban dichotomy as a point of departure to show that its intrinsic, competing constellations forged new rural realisms at the intersection of modernist form, ethnography, and reportage.