Maximilian Stejskal: Folklig Idrott

Maximilian Stejskal (1906-1991), an ethnologist and gymnastics teacher from Helsinki, carried out a study for his PhD thesis on folk athletic contests amongst Finland's Swedish-speaking male rural population in the early 20th century. For his study Stejskal biked across large swaths of southern and eastern Finland as well as Estonia for a month or two every year from 1929 to 1937 and then again in 1948, equipped with two bellows cameras and a box of photographic glass plates. On these excursions he systematically collected information about the traditional games, or folk athletics as he calls them, which were hardly practiced anymore even then. For the most part elderly farmers and craftsmen would tell him in detail about the exercises and tests of strength and courage with which they had tried to prove their virility in their younger days. According to these descriptions, their sons, relatives and farm hands were asked to perform the exercises in front of the camera so Stejskal could photograph them. During his field research, which took over 20 years, Stejskal amassed a considerable collection of documentation, which he divided up into 11 different sections, one for each excursion. It comprises over two thousand handwritten pages of travelogues, descriptions of exercises, tables, sketches, musical and phonetic recordings and 433 photographs. This book focuses on a small selection of those photographs.

Maximilian Stejskal (19061991), an ethnologist and gymnastics teacher from Helsinki, carried out a study for his PhD thesis on folk athletic contests amongst Finlands Swedish-speaking male rural population between 1929 and 1937, and then again in 1948. Each year, Stejskal set off on his green Italian bicycle with two bellows cameras and glass photographic plates in a rucksack across southeastern Finland and Finnish Estonia. He systematically collected images of fast-disappearing folk athletics, recording elderly farmers and craftsmens tales of the exercises and tests of strength and courage with which they proved their virility in their youth. Their sons, relatives and farmhands were asked to perform the exercises in front of Stejskals camera. This slender, oversized publication includes a selection of these bizarre and often humorous images, enlarged and reproduced as full bleeds with titles such as Crawling away from your sins and Upend the apprentice, making this a source book of strangely compelling performative imagery.