Vilnius, J. Bułhak – a steam engine at a power plant, as seen in a photograph from the 1920s.

[VILNIUS—next to a steam engine at a power plant—scene photograph]. [1920s]. Photograph, 10.9 x 16.7 cm, by JanBułhak in Vilnius.
In the lower right corner, a stamp reads: “J. Bułhak Vilnius.” On the reverse, a stamp reads: “J. Bułhak Art Photographer Vilnius, 8 Jagiellońska St.” On the reverse, there are traces of removal from an album; otherwise, the condition is good.
J. Bułhak (1876–1950)—an outstanding Polish photographer, the doyen of Polish photography, a philosopher and theorist, founder of the Vilnius Photo Club in 1927, and a co-founder of the ZPAF after World War II. He established his first studio at the urging of Ferdynand Ruszczyc. For a time, he worked in Hugo Erfurt’s studio in Dresden. His first works in Vilnius were created between 1912 and 1919 and were devoted mainly to landscapes and monumental architecture. It was precisely these themes that became central to his body of work, and he focused primarily on them for the rest of his life. He was a pioneer of landscape photography. His collection of approximately 10,000 photographs, “Poland in Photographic Landscapes,” and his photo archive of Polish and foreign images were destroyed by fire in Vilnius in 1944. After the war, until 1946, he took approximately 1,000 photographs documenting the destruction and reconstruction of Warsaw and approximately 2,000 photographs from the Western Territories. He published numerous albums, portfolios, and postcards featuring photographs, mainly from the Borderlands and especially those depicting the Vilnius region. He was also the author of many textbooks on the aesthetics and techniques of photography and local history, as well as the initiator of historical research on photography.