Albanian village life from 1976
The Swedish photographer Ann Christine Eek has published a unique book in 2021 of photographies from her visit to village of Isniq in Kosova in 1976. We're bringing her story and a selection of photos
We published on Monday our weekly list of events to attend, places to visit but there simply was no space to recommend the book we liked this week. Thus we decided to do a special article for a special book: “Albanian Village Life, Isniq - Kosovo 1976”. The text below is also edited from the introductory notes of the book, with some minor edits:
The author is the Swedish photographer Ann Christine Eek. In August and September 1976, she travelled with the Norwegian anthropologist Berit Backer (1947-1993) to the Albanian village Isniq in Kosovo. After several weeks’ stay in what was then a patriarchal society, documenting a traditional culture about to vanish, Backer and Eek returned home with thousands of photographs, numerous notes, and interviews.
However, everyday realities, and the tragic death of Berit Backer delayed for many years the book they had planned. Backer was unfortunately killed by a Kosovan Albanian living in Norway who was declared mentally unstable by the court.
Searching for credible and strong visual expressions, Eek portrays in her photographs the very hospitable Albanians of the village: its women and men, with respect and dignity. The province Kosovo, in 1974 became an autonomous province in the Socialist Yugoslavia, but was still unknown to the world, and the fate of its Albanian population even more so.
With plans to make a book about the disappearing traditional village life, Backer and Eek made a short documentary film based on still photographs. For this reason, Eek took many thousand photographs, in colour and black and white. They had no access to the closed men’s world, but concentrated the project on the stories of five village women. Although she hardly spoke any Albanian, the women quickly accepted her, soon overlooking her presence. This gave her the possibility to move around unnoticed, to photograph the women always working, at home and in the mountains, baking bread, cooking, knitting, weaving, caring for the children, and tending to crops and livestock.
Today this is a documentation of historic importance, recollecting a vanished culture, Eek shows us what everyday village life looked like in Kosovo in 1976, through the narratives of the women who invited her into their homes.
The book closes with a historic survey about the Kosovar Albanians, supressed for centuries. The photographs of village life, deeply harmed by the 1998-1999 war, has become part of the history, and cultural heritage of Republic of Kosovo.
We bought the book in Dukagjini bookshop, but you can also order it online. We recommend using Kosovan bookshops online to help local libraries! We are only showing few photos from the book which has many, many more - and this is our weekly book recommendation.
