Blood and milk. Oresteia Kapidani’s exhibition in Shkodër

The Marubi Photo Museum in Shkodër stands as one of the city’s most significant cultural institutions. Founded in 1856 by Pietro Marubbi, a Garibaldian exile from Italy, the photo studio, opening onto the main street, flourished under his adopted son and then his grandson for a century, until its nationalization in the 1950s. Today, its collection of nearly half a million pictures represents the most important historical photographic archive in Albania.

Alongside its historical holdings, the museum showcases contemporary Albanian photography. Currently on display is Shkodër-based photographer Orestia Kapidani’s 2004 series Milk and Blood, portraying the residents of the village of Mes, northeast of the city. The subjects appear individually or with their families on the heights above the Kir River, with the old Ottoman Mesi Bridge forming a striking backdrop.

Most of the figures are dressed in traditional attire and adopt a ritualized, almost sculptural posture for the camera, their faces closed, as though conscious of the legacy they are just leaving behind. From these images, one senses that their lives are lived according to similarly ritualized, traditional roles. The weight of endured hardships is etched into the faces of the elders, coupled with the same closedness through which they have weathered their trials.

The bridge, meanwhile, provides not only a visual anchor but also layers of historical resonance. It served as the inspiration for Nobel laureate Ismail Kadare’s novel The Three-Arched Bridge. In Kadare’s tale, the bridge is built by the community through their own labor, a hopeful gesture aimed at connecting them to the wider world, only to see the Ottoman army eventually march across it. The collaborative construction reflects several stories of effort and perseverance, loyalty and betrayal—most strikingly, the harrowing Balkan motif of entombing a human within the bridge to secure its stability.

In Kapidani’s photographs, each member of the community stands alone or with their immediate family, yet the bridge evokes the wider communal ties to which they belong, and whose preservation essentially requires them to entomb themselves within their closed, traditional roles.