Depicting Childhood. The Innocence of the Age as captured in Photographs and Postcards from Bukovina (1880-1920)

The children’s image in photographs and postcards is a formidable epistemological challenge that can facilitate the synchronization of individual or collective life stories, with certain aspects of social history. While in the Western historiography, the “history of children” has already a long tradition, in the Romanian historiography it never really received much interest; however, only in the last decade there appeared a few articles, studies and books on this domain. In Bukovina’s case, such a research “slips through fingers”, and the study of depicting childhood is still in its early stages. The set of images analyzed in the following article indicates a series of epoch features, constant and canonical, clichés borrowed from Central and Western Europe. They help to describe types of portraits (family, individual, specific solemn moments), poses and conventional models, more or less expressive, but which meet both public and private commands and expectations of the time. In other words, the documentary value of these visual resources in which the children appear is obvious. It favors the exploration of daily life and social customs that are still exposed to many questions.