Gypsy musicians In his long career, the anthropologist Joel Martin Halpern (b. April 8, 1929) has worked in regions from the Alaskan arctic to Laos and Lapland, but he is best known for his studies of modernization in the Balkans. A 1950 graduate of the University of Michigan, Halpern's dissertation at Columbia (1956) was based on field research in Orašac, and resulted in his first book, A Serbian Village (N.Y., 1958).

In the course of their first stay in Yugoslavia, Halpern and his wife Barbara Kerewsky Halpern visited Macedonia, where they made an ethnographic collection for the American Museum of Natural History and took dozens of photographs of village and city life. The Halperns returned to Macedonia in 1962, 1973, 1978, and 2003, each time making a close photographic record to accompany their field notes and letters. The number of these visits combined with the dense documentation that resulted provides a rare opportunity to examine long term diachronic patterns in cultural change, particularly when seen in conjunction with the earlier ethnographic work of Jozef Obrebski in 1931-1932. The letters written home by the Halperns in 1954 have been published in Halpern and Kerewsky-Halpern, "Letters from Macedonia," EthnoAnthropo Zoom (2003).

The following collection consists of over 1,400 photographs taken by Joel M. Halpern during his several research trips to Macedonia between 1954 and 1978. Captions for the photographs were graciously provided by Ljupčo Risteski of the University of Skopje, Macedonia, in consultation with Halpern.