Many Times We Were Seen by Popinė and by the Altarija Hills

Jan Bułhak created many images of Vilnius that became part of the city’s memory and imagination. One of the most intensive periods of Bułhak’s creative life, in which Vilnius photography held a special place, lasted from 1912 to 1915.

In the autumn of 1911, the Magistrate of the city of Vilnius supported a proposal by the painter Ferdynand Ruszczyc to establish a municipal photographic archive. On the artist’s recommendation, the task of photographing the city was entrusted to Jan Bułhak, a photographer still unknown in Vilnius, and the Magistrate allocated funding for the work. Bułhak was to photograph the city’s architecture and its details, as well as cityscapes, and to compile albums of Vilnius photographs.

In his memoirs of Ruszczyc, Bułhak describes this time period as follows: “That autumn, my fate was being decided.”

Before beginning the assignment, Bułhak travelled to Germany to broaden his artistic knowledge and acquaint himself with recent developments in photography. He spent part of the winter and the spring travelling. On his return in the summer of 1912, he moved all his photographic equipment from the Pereseka manor near Minsk, which he managed, and set up a new studio in Vilnius. As Bułhak writes in his memoirs of the painter, this summer was “both sad and difficult, yet hot and productive”. Bułhak titled the chapter in which he recalled the beginning of this new stage in his life, which required leaving the home he had made at the manor, “The Draw of Vilnius”.

In early December 1912, with Ruszczyc’s warm and enthusiastic support, Bułhak opened a fine-art photography studio at 4 Portovaja Street (now 2 Pamėnkalnio Street).

The opening lasted two days, during which Bułhak introduced himself to the Vilnius public with an exhibition of his photographs. After the last guest left, the photographer was exhausted by the preparations and excitement, yet the opening went well, and his studio was crowded during those days.

The panoramas of Vilnius, with their “allure of distant vistas,” as J. Bułhak called it; sanctuaries encircled by hills; palace ensembles and their interiors; squares, streets and lanes; outlines and facades shaped by different eras; houses and courtyards hidden deep within the city; and finally, the light flowing through the city, or a turn in the street brought into relief by a receding passer-by—all of this Bułhak sought to see and capture.

Bułhak had known Vilnius from his school days. For ten years he attended a Russian gymnasium housed in the former premises of Vilnius University, which had been closed after the 1830–1831 uprising. As he himself later wrote, those school years left him with “conflicting memories—politically repugnant, but warm in friendship.” Later, once settled at the Pereseka manor inherited from his mother, he would gladly visit his acquaintances and relatives in Vilnius. Yet, as he later said of his early acquaintance with Vilnius, “I was blind.”

His acquaintance and growing friendship with Ruszczyc opened up a different perspective on the city. The painter was captivated by Vilnius: he was drawn to the character of the old city and its distinctive spirit—the genius loci of Vilnius. For Bułhak, it was a new way of seeing Vilnius, and he wrote: “at every step, [Ruszczyc] showed me things of which I had not the slightest idea.”

The painter and photographer began taking walks through Vilnius, sometimes turning them into veritable wanderings through the city. Sometimes, city archivist Wacław Gizbert-Studnicki would join them. Bułhak referred to him in his memoirs as “a living chronicle of the history of old Vilnius”, and the archivist’s friends jokingly nicknamed him “arch-madman”. 

Each participant in these walks had a distinct way of seeing the city. Ruszczyc was fascinated by architectural harmonies and unexpected perspectives that revealed themselves to the passionate city walker as a reward for persistent searching. Gizbert-Studnicki, who loved Vilnius and knew it intimately, enriched these walks with his knowledge of the city’s history and historical detail. Bułhak would look for his own way of seeing Vilnius. He wrote about these excursions as follows:

Between 1912 and 1915, Bułhak presented the “Photographic Archive”, a 15-volume collection of 462 photographs of Vilnius, to the Magistrate of the city. The photographer was fully absorbed in his work, which was going well and had earned him a recognition as a Vilnian. At the same time, Bułhak created other collections and albums, reproduced his photographs, and distributed them as individual prints. Therefore, even after the disaster of 10 July 1944, when Bułhak’s home and studio burned down during the fighting in Vilnius and his archive was lost, a considerable part of his images survived.

Bułhak’s photographic style was strongly influenced by Pictorialism. This movement in art photography emerged after decades of nineteenth-century debate over whether, and how, photography could be art, given the technical nature of the medium and its association with the mechanical reproduction of reality. 

Pictorialist photography emphasized emotional effect and was marked by the photographer’s subjective expression, as well as by mood and composition. Pictorialists valued painterly, atmospheric images, soft focus, and the deliberate orchestration of the frame.

For them, photography was a field of artistic creation, an equal branch of the visual arts rather than merely a tool for documenting reality.

Because of their affinity with Pictorialist aesthetics, Bułhak’s photographs are not merely an extensive archive of images of the city as it once was, commissioned by the Magistrate of the city, but also a reflection of the photographer’s relationship with the city, his inner quests, artistic aspirations, and states of mind.

An otherworldly Vilnius, a rhythmic and resonant space, a vision of the city or an enchanting dream—Bułhak’s photographs are often described in such words, especially his panoramas, whose clear, open space seems infinite. Paradoxically, these images are both photographs and dreams of the city. This is why a fingerprint left on the surface of a photograph has such an unexpected effect: it seems to catch the dream and remind us that it was once held in someone’s hands.

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Vilnius University Library holds books, postcards, and over 100 photographs by J. Bułhak (1876–1950). The collection consists mainly of interwar photographs of the Library’s interiors and staff, along with several images of Vilnius. In 2026, marking Bułhak’s 150^th birth anniversary, the Library expanded its digital collection.

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