The Photography Room

Photography and the Countryside
The Tenth Instalmentof the Photography Room
30 October 2024 – 9 February 2025
Curator of the Instalment: Katarzyna Mączewska

With the industrial revolution advancing in the 1800s and the early 1900s, the cultural landscape of the countryside underwent many changes. As traditional architecture, crafts and customs were disap¬pearing, the fading world became a symbol of national culture, the subject of ethnographic study, an inspiration for artists and a place to rest from the bustle of the city. Themes of traditional village life, folk costumes and rituals also proved captivating for photographers.

It was likely in the summer of 1856 that Marcin Olszyński produced a series of photographs in the village Starogród on the river Świder, which included architectural views and the portraits of local people. The copies in the collection of the National Museum in Warsaw constitute unusually early evidence of Polish village life documented photographically. A newspaper of the time described them as “capturing nature in all of its truth, beauty and simplicity” [Kurier Warszawski, no. 325 (1856)]. One theme in the visual culture of the era were “folk types”: the portraits of people wearing tradi¬tional, regional costumes. It was explored by photographers such as Warsaw’s Karol Beyer and Kraków’s Walery Rzewuski and Ignacy Krieger – the pioneers of ethnographic photography in these lands. In 1866, preparing his materials for the All-Russian Ethnographic Exhibition in Moscow (1867), Beyer took a series of portraits depicting peasants from the regions of Warsaw and Kalisz. The works were also exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris that year. Meanwhile, the landscape of Podolia (Podillia) and the impoverished people of the region were photographed by Józef Kordysz and Michał Greim, who worked in Kamieniec Podolski (Kamianets-Podilskyi).

A different image of rural life was spread thorough pastoralism, which presented the countryside as a place of rest, peace and outdoor leisure for the upper classes. Numerous estates in pictur¬esque locations allowed landowners to escape their hectic city lives. Their meticulously curated parks and gardens hosted children’s games, horseback rides and relaxing strolls. Among the guests visiting country estates were also artists and photographers, who documented the lifestyle. The diversity of rural landscapes depicted in photographs provided a model for Romantic and Positivist liter¬ature as well as the visual arts. The creators of national culture were inspired by images of village life seen both from the perspective of the landowner and the serf.

Filled with tranquility and mystery, countryside landscapes were a well-suited subject for early photographic techniques, such as the calotype. Technological progress brought new opportunities to develop the theme, which appeared frequently in works by the Picto-rialists in the early 1900s. Rural scenery was explored by Jan Bułhak, who coined the term “native photography”, and captured by amateur and documentalist photographers. In the early 1900s, due to inter¬national armed conflicts such as the First World War (1914–1918), the landscape of the countryside suffered irreparable losses.

The photographs of the countryside and its inhabitants served as models for illustrations in the press and in scientific publications, research materials for artists and scholars, documentation, and travel souvenirs or vignettes. These images preserved on light-sen-sitive paper became a valuable source on the history, the spread of knowledge about the Polish countryside and its visual culture. Today, the value of these historical portrayals of cultural heritage cannot be overestimated.