The research I am going to present in my paper aims to investigate the issue of women's participation in the development of modern culture and arts, examining photographs made by women living in Lviv in 1930s, both professionals and amateurs. There are several dimensions in which the research will be oriented: gender one, addressing the issue of modernization and re-mapping of social structure in terms of class, social activities and roles of both men and women; cultural one, dealing with multi-cultural, multi-ethnical and multi-national specificity of the region of Galicia (both as a part of Austro-Hungarian Empire, and as a part of Independent Poland after 1918); technological one, combining studies on early cinema and on modern photography (as medium and industry) with the issue of women's access (and attitude) to new visual technologies. Such a research project needs a complex, interdisciplinary and comparative methodology, consisting of tools and skills taken from the area of gender studies, cultural studies and film studies (especially so called New Film History, identified with the idea of film archeology).
