Abstract

This paper presents the photographic estate of a twentieth-century Benedictine monk from South Tyrol. Pater Ambros Trafojer was born in Gries-Bozen in 1891, and at his death in 1974 left his brothers at Muri-Gries Abbey a legacy comprising several thousand photographs. The half century of monastic and local history covered by this somewhat idiosyncratic record was a period rocked by multiple regime changes and the transformative impact of modernization, especially following the dawn of a new, democratic era in 1945. The paper pays special attention to the perceptual peculiarities of this talented amateur, some of whose images break with convention and hold great promise as sources of information. The entire estate is currently being digitized to serve as a revelatory archive of the last century.

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