Fifty Photographs: selections from SCUA collections

Shopping Serbia

by Joel Halpern, 1984

Anthropologist Joel Halpern devoted much of his work to studying social modernization in the Balkans. Under the auspices of ethnography he photographed communities in what was then Yugoslavia, paying attention to landscape and architecture as well as local customs.

This slice-of-life picture, taken near Aran?jelovac in what is now Serbia, is held together by pops of red: a bag, a patch, a skirt, and even the brick building at right. The long paved road receding into the distance keeps us all moving along.