17th Edition of the Photography Cabinet / Józef Czechowicz (1818–1888) – Photographer of Vilnius

Vilnius will be the subject of the Photography Cabinet exhibition for the first time.

Józef Czechowicz, a Vilnius landscape photographer, masterfully captured the city set among hills, above the picturesque meandering rivers Wilia and Wilejka, which delighted Jan Bułhak (1876–1950) himself. Bułhak regarded his nineteenth-century predecessor as “the first Vilnius representative of native photography”. The exhibition presents prints on albumen paper and glass collodion negatives, allowing visitors to see how a professional photographer worked during the “golden age” of this new field of art. Józef Czechowicz was an artist devoted to discovering the most beautiful viewpoints and valuable monuments of Vilnius. The photographer’s landscapes reveal not only the city’s beauty but also its history, so significant for our collective memory.

The biography of Józef Czechowicz remains a subject of research for historians of photography in Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Poland. It is known that he was born in 1818 into a Catholic noble family near Polotsk, in the then Vitebsk Governorate. He completed grammar school in Vitebsk, after which he became a civil servant in the Ministry of War, where he worked until 1856. He then held posts in many offices and various localities, including Zamość. Around 1853, during a break from military service, he became interested in photography and opened a portrait studio in Lublin. In 1856 he went to Paris, where he learned the secrets of photographic techniques. After returning from France he settled in Kiev, from where in 1861 he moved to Vitebsk and opened a photographic studio, but soon closed it for administrative reasons. In August 1865 he settled in Vilnius, where he began working as a photographer in rented premises in Skopówka and Antokol. By 1867 he already owned his own wooden pavilion on the municipal square by the Botanical Garden.

In Vilnius, Czechowicz, well acquainted with European achievements in this new field of art, specialised in the so-called wet collodion process. This negative-positive technique, which used a glass plate coated with wet collodion containing light-sensitive chemical compounds as the negative base, began its expansion in 1851 during the Great Exhibition in London. Its inventors are considered to be the Frenchman Gustave Le Gray and the Englishman Frederick Scott Archer. The advantages of the new technique included shorter exposure times, the ability to produce any number of prints, and perfect sharpness of the image. Each photographer prepared the chemical reagents needed for the best, that is, the most sensitive, collodion himself. The photograph had to be taken immediately, while the plate was still wet. Likewise, the photographer prepared the albumen paper for prints from developed negatives himself. The entire photographic process thus retained an authorial character, which contributed, among other things, to the high prices of photographic prints.

The perfectly composed and professionally executed photographs by Czechowicz earned recognition not only in Vilnius itself and among Poles living in the territories of other partitions, but also in Paris, Saint Petersburg and Moscow. In 1876 the artist was admitted to the prestigious Société de photographie française. The current exhibition presents, among other things, several photographs whose prints are still held in the collections of this prestigious Paris institution. They are: Most Zielony (The Green Bridge), the Church of Saint Casimir, and the interior of the Church of Saints Peter and Paul.

Józef Czechowicz left his photographic studio and his entire creative legacy to his long-time life partner, Anna de Rotte (1845–1923). After his death she married the painter Wincenty Sleńdziński and continued to run the atelier, additionally signing Czechowicz’s works with a stamp bearing her own surname. Thanks to the family’s care for the legacy of this outstanding photographer, his glass negatives have survived, which the MNW acquired in 1967 from Ludomir Sleńdziński, son of Anna and…