BIOS
Loïc Chauvin and Christian Raby

Musicien, circa 1930. Photo by Margaret Hasluck. Courtesy of Margaret Woodward.

Loïc Chauvin is a publisher of photography books, tourist guides, etc. He is also a photographer who covered the embassy crisis in Tirana, 1990, for the Sygma agency and has had photographs published in Paris Match, Time, etc.  

Christian Raby is a professor of philosophy and a photographer who taught at the University of Chicago Center in Paris. He was the grand prize winner (black and white) of the Ilford Jury, 1992.

Loïc Chauvin started researching Albanian photography in 1990, and that research formed the basis for his book, Albanie, visages des Balkans, in 1995. Since 2006, he has continued to explore Albanian photography collections, with the help of Christian Raby. Together, they have published three more books and organized more than a dozen exhibitions on Albanian photography in France, Albania, Belgium and Croatia.

PROJECT
Margaret Hasluck, a Scottish Photographer in Albania 
2015

Hasluck was an anthropologist, archeologist, and linguist. A legend throughout Albania, she was considered the world’s foremost authority on Albanian folklore and language. She wrote the first book in English about the customary law of Northern Albani tribes (1934) and published an Albanian phrase book and the first book of English-Albanian grammar.

Machine à Coudre, circa 1930. Photo by Margaret Hasluck. Courtesy of Margaret Woodward.

While exploring Albanian photography archives, we discovered a trove of glass plate negatives that Margaret Hasluck left at the Institute of Popular Culture in Tirana when she was expelled from the country in 1939 by the Italian occupation. We were astounded by the quality and diversity of the photographs of landscapes, people, craftsmen, shops, markets, portraits, funerals. In 2011, we published a book about the history of Albanian photography with an overview of 12 Albanian photographers including Hasuck.

Although there are many articles and books devoted to Hasuck, it is never mentioned that she was a photographer. So, we wanted to give her appropriate credit as a pioneer photographer in the Balkans.

The Palmquist grant supported our travel from Paris to London to research at University College and the Royal Geographic Society.  

Deux Femmes, circa 1930. Photo by Margaret Hasluck. Courtesy of Margaret Woodward.

Our first exhibition was in Grenoble, France, displaying the photos of Margaret Hasluck along with photos from an Albanian photographer working at the same time. The exhibition will be presented in Zagreb next April and in Lardy, a small city near Paris, the same month. We hope to have an exhibit in the Alpes soon. Likewise, we are also in contact with French and British embassies in Albania to organize an exhibition in Tirana.

We've contacted the University of Aberdeen and the University of Cambridge and we'll plan to go soon to explore the archives of Margaret Hasluck works there.

A few photos from the Grenoble exhibition. dropbox.com/

A press article about the Grenoble exhibition in the regional daily newspaper. dropbox.com/

This link is a presentation of the event (resacoop.org/albanie-d-un-monde-l-autre).
eshph.org PDF
Expo_Sotiri_Hasluck_catalogue[424].pdf

UPDATE
Chauvic and Raby have been able to organize three additional exhibits: one in Zagreb and two in the French Alps. Chauvic also traveled to Scotland in 2018 to meet Margaret Hasluck’s family and discuss an exhibition in Elgin, where Margaret Hasluck had her primary education. He also had a discussion with the director of Museums of the University of Aberdeen (where there is a good collection of objects gathered by Margaret Hasluck in Albania).

The two are presently working on another project about photographic archives (400,000 photos from 1906 to 2000) of the Pyrenees. They presented an exhibition at the French Institute in Zagreb, one at Bagnères-de-Bigorre, and another in a Cistercian abbey near Tarbes (in the Pyrénées).

Musiciens, circa 1930. Photo by Margaret Hasluck. Courtesy of Margaret Woodward.