Eugène PITTARD – Workshop

Albania 1921 – Eugène Pittard

Workshop & Photography Exhibition
The Cinema Cube – Pyramid Centre
Tuesday, 16 December 2025 | 14:00

After the success of the three-week exhibition at COD – the Centre for Openness and Dialogue, the project “Albania 1921 – Eugène Pittard” returns to the wider Albanian public, this time in an open urban setting, in the park of the Pyramid Centre. This return marks not only a physical relocation of the exhibition, but also a new conceptual opening towards dialogue, education and the active involvement of the public.

The open workshop, organised in collaboration with the lecturers Kein Katroshi, Orestia Kapidani and Harri Aleksi, with students from New York University Tirana and the University of Arts Tirana, mentored by the curator of the exhibition Elton Koritari, aims to create a space for reflection on photography as a historical document, as a humanist act and as a tool of contemporary interpretation. Through discussion, image reading and installation interventions, participants are invited to revisit the relationship between the photographer, the subject and the historical context.

Press on the workshop: “Albania 1921” by Eugène Pittard – Workshop & Photography Exhibition

Eugène Pittard's photographic work conveys the human condition at a fragile moment in Albanian history and represents one of the earliest examples of what we would today call social photography. In hundreds of images, Pittard sees Albanians not as objects of cold anthropological study, but as individuals with dignity, history and a living presence. His humanist eye builds a narrative that goes beyond scientific documentation and becomes an act of respect and empathy.

The exhibition at the Pyramid Centre proposes a journey through time by means of photography and installation, transporting the public to the year 1921 — a foundational, yet uncertain, moment for Albania. In this experience, the images appear not merely as relics of the past, but as tools for reflecting on identity, collective memory and the way visual history continues to shape our perception today.

This workshop–exhibition aims to be an open platform where historical photography meets contemporary practice, and where the public becomes an active part of the process of interpreting and reimagining the past.

Press on the workshop: An anthropological workshop, Pittard's photographs and the rites and traditions of 1920s Albania