Commonly regarded as the father of Polish artistic photography, Jan Bułhak (1876-1950), came across photography only at the age of thirty and made his first photos with a camera owned by his wife Anna. With true amateur dedication he devoted himself to photographing his native of the Grodno region (now in Belarus) and became—as Jan Sunderland accurately remarks—a landscapist ‘idolatrously sensitive to the world around him, sun, forests, clouds and the earth.’ At the same time the artist actively, though mostly by correspondence, sought contact with artistic circles of Vilnius, Warsaw and further abroad —Berlin, Brussels, Paris.
His breakthrough proved to be a meeting with symbolist painter Ferdynand Ruszczyc, in 1910, under whose influence Bułhak decided to pursue an artistic career. Living in his backwater household in borderland Peresiece near the Belarusian Minsk Bułhak had no chance to master the challenging photochemical processes which underlie an artistic craftsmanship. In 1912, he set off to Dresden to learn the trade from a German portraitist who remained under the influence of Hugo Erfurth’s pictorialism. After the course in Dresden, Bułhak moved with his family to Vilnius at the instigation of Ruszczyc and opened his own studio. From that point, in Bułhak’s work the gentle rural landscape gave way to Vilnius, the city by no means modern, but specifically preserved by history.
Along with spring, began unforgettable wanderings around the town in the company of Ruszczyc, who in his spare time liked to wander in our alleys and stand in admiration before picturesque or monumental sights [...] he introduced me to the living city, and at every step he showed me things I had no idea of before. I couldn’t yet see enough, but it was not inherent blindness: my attitude towards nature testified even to the opposite dispositions. It was rather an endosperm, which was caused by the former environment I used to live in.
–Bułhak immodestly recalled Ruszczyc and 1913.
His new perception of the environment is also evident in the less known and certainly not picturesque series Wileńskie kuchnie ludowe / Vilnius Soup Kitchens made in 1915. The photographs document wartime poverty, and more specifically, the functioning of the charitable food kitchens established at the initiative of Vincent Łubieński. Along with photos of the kitchen facilities Bułhak took a series of portraits of their visitors. While Małgorzata Plater-Zyberk describes the scenes of the poor of Vilnius waiting in queues for a meal and forcing space at the tables as ‘shocking, partly arranged reportage’, the portraits, on the other hand, resemble formally beautiful images of the urban elite, a circle in which regularly moved the artist. A look at the reality of society deprived of pictorial softness resulted probably from the commissioned character of the work, but also from a lack of dogmatism, which over time would become Bułhak’s typical approach to the art.
Vilnius Soup Kitchens is therefore a modern, socially engaged exception that proves the pictorialist, middle class, so to speak, principle of Jan Bułhak’s photography. Looking at the faces of starving children, women burdened with bundles and homeless old people, one can see what will have disappeared almost completely from a sleek in every detail artistic photography after WWII. Jan Bułhak distinguished such photography from common snapping photos by calling it ‘fotografika’ (literally photographics).
Author: Adam Mazur, March 2015, transl. GS, May 2015