Circulation of photographic plates between Jovan Cvijić and Emmanuel de Martonne
Abstract
My contribution is anchored in History of geography in particuliar in history of geomorphology. I use the Historian's methodology to study the geomorphological discipline without being myself a geomorphologist. As a French, I am very interested in links between Cvijic and French geographers. In this paper, I am particularly interested in the links between Cvijic and French geographers. I would like to precise that my contribution will concern neither the political point of view as Cvijic's interventions before the committees to prepare the Peace treaties of the First World War in Paris in 1919-1920, nor the Central Europe map redrawing, especially the birth of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in December 1918. My main question concerns the circulation of knowledge between Cvijic and French geographers analyzing precisely his photographs. By choosing to study the iconography of Cvijic, I am going beyond disciplinary boundaries between physical geography, human geography and ethnography. I will develop my contribution into two parts. First, my starting point is the discovery of about 65 photographic plates from J. Cvijic in the French Geographer E. de Martonne's collection in Paris. It follows three questions : Why these Cvijic's photos in the photographic library of E. Martonne ? What does it say about relations between the two geographers ? What does it say about Cvijic 's geographical methodology, in particuliar his field geography ? In the second part, I will explain how Cvijic's plates corpus in E. de Martonne's funds partly reflects his field geographical methodology.