Land without a Name
In 1932, Czech writer and journalist Ivan Olbracht used this title for a book about the province of Ruthenia (now part of Ukraine) that had been annexed by the newly created Czechoslovak state. A remote territory of woodcutters and farmers, Ruthenia, in Olbracht’s view, lacked a name of its own because it had been subject to naming by so many competing national entities.
Throughout central Europe, the ‘land’ had been a symbol of pure and unified national character since the nineteenth century. Widely distributed images by photographers such as Rudolf Balogh, whose Shepherd with his Dogs promoted a romanticised notion of the 'exotic at home', served to lay claim to ethnic purity in a time of rapidly shifting borders and new pressures on national identity.
Photography, like writing, served to ‘name the land,’ creating a fictional, harmonious image of the landscape and its occupants. Homeland Photography (Heimatphotographie in German) developed into a widely recognised and state-supported movement throughout the region in the 1930s to suit this nationalist embrace of the countryside. As the territorially grasping Third Reich laid claim to ever more places in 1930s Europe, such work took on an increasingly heavy symbolic charge. Some landscape photographers echoed Nazi ideology outright or implicitly; others turned to the land in foreboding or resignation, predicting the disaster to come.
