Our Digital Library contains 310 digital objects
Collection
Jan Bulhak's Collections
Jan Bułhak (1876–1950) was one of the most recognizable photographers of the Second Polish Republic. He is featured in the IDMN legacy for a reason—as the creator of the concept of "homeland photography" (fotografia ojczysta), the principles of which he outlined in his guidebook Polska Fotografia Ojczysta (Poznań, 1939). Bułhak wanted the Polish school of photography to develop its own individual character and distinctiveness, setting it apart from foreign photography. He chose the Polish landscape as well as the architecture of Polish towns and villages as his main subjects. His photographs were characterized by an idealization of the Polish landscape and the interplay of broad planes of light and shadow. The shots were typical of the pictorialist aesthetic—aiming to make photographs resemble paintings or prints, and rejecting photography’s purely documentary nature.
The Institute's collection includes digital copies of Bułhak's works provided by his family. Many of these are unique pieces not widely available, including photographs of the author's family members. For the digital archive, we selected photographs depicting places destroyed during World War II—which also claimed a large portion of the author's own negatives—as well as images of the Vilnius region, symbolizing a lost world.
