Mountain Photography and the Constitution of National Identity

Abstract

The author analyzes the way in which from the end of the previous century on mountain photography helped to constitute and strengthen the so-called Slovenian national identity. He sketches the historical background that enabled the mountains and their representations to attain such a prominence within the more recent national history. He then compares the process of the visual representation within the context of the process of constitution of national identity with those found in some other European countries. Beside the standard carriers of national identity such as language, culture, territory, history, etc., in Slovenia the mountains too serve this function. They carry a special significance for they conflate the quotidian bourgeois need to escape back to nature and the need to constitute one's subjective or collective identity around a void. In the Slovenian case this void is represented also by photographic depictions of the mountains which have the privilege to be simultaneously a »real« and an imaginary place. As such they represent an almost ideal national common denominator which enables members of various segments of the nation to identity with it and thence be interpellated into Slovenians.