Nie tylko Kriegerowie

Fotografowie Krakowa i jego zabytków w XIX wieku

Abstrakt

NOT ONLY THE KRIEGERS. THE PHOTOGRAPHERS OF KRAKÓW AND ITS MONUMENTS IN THE 19TH CENTURY

The photographic studio run by Ignacy, Natan and Amalia Krieger is popularly associated with photographs of Kraków from the second half of the 19th century, however, it was by no means the first, or the only studio that produced such photographs in that period. The oldest surviving photographs representing the city of Kraków date from the 1850s, yet it is certain that the set of photographs that have been preserved is not complete. Until recently, scholars had identied a group of twelve photographs produced in the years 1858–1859 by Karol Beyer’s studio (i.e. not only by Beyer himself, but also by Melecjusz Dutkiewicz) as the oldest, however, these were most probably chronologically preceded by two pannotypes created in or before 1857, showing views of the Main Market Square.
Ignacy Krieger opened his studio in 1860, and so did another photographer, Walery Rzewuski. In the beginning it was the latter man who seemed to lead the way in photographing the city, but in the end it was Ignacy Krieger and his children who became Kraków’s chief documentalists. There is no telling what induced Krieger to focus on that particular subject, but it is certain that his studio offered a series of views presenting the city’s major monuments already by the second half of the 1860s. We will find photographs of Kraków in the works of other local photographers active in the 19th century, such as Walery Maliszewski, Józef Zajaczkowski, Awit Szubert, Stanisław Bizanski, Juliusz Mien, Józef Sebald, and Tadeusz Jabłonski, yet none of them offered services which could match the professional comprehensiveness of the Kriegers. Apart from local, Kraków-based photographers, for various reasons the city was also documented by visiting photographers, while the number of amateur photographers at that time was scarce, due to technical difficulties and high costs. Undoubtedly, a large part of the photographs of Kraków were created on the initiative of the photographers themselves, i.e. for sale, while the demand for this kind of images may be inscribed into the general demand for national iconography. The Kriegers, along with other photographers, also prepared visual documentation of the academic research conducted by such bodies as the Commission on Art History of the Polish Academy of Learning, and the Group of Conservators of Western Galicia.