Dainius Junevičius, Margarita Matulytė. 19th-century photographer Wilhelm Józef Zacharczyk’s Vilnius Album

This scholarly publication presents the first comprehensive disucssion of the work of photographer Wilhelm Józef Zacharczyk, which was so important to Lithuania’s cultural history.

Zacharczyk’s collection of photographs, under the title Vilnius Album, is one of the first representational photo-narratives about Vilnius to have been created in the 19th century. The author who captured this city of light, after one year (1865–1866) of familiarisation that undoubtedly led to his affection for it, was a young man aged twenty-five, born in Kremenec in the Volhynia Governorate (present-day Ukraine), who arrived in Vilnius from Warsaw where he had been taught the art of photography by probably one of the most outstanding photographers in Poland at the time, Maksymilian Fajans.

In this book, the authors reconstruct Zacharczyk’s biography, discuss the Vilnius surroundings captured in the photographer’s work (D. Junevičius) and analyse the culture of photographic album formation and compilation as it was in the 19th century (M. Matulytė). The complete Vilnius Album is presented here: facsimiles of 52 photographs are published along with commentary describing the content of the images, information about the photographed objects is supplemented with original citations from historical sources, reflecting contemporaries’ impressions and accentuating the tsarist regime’s provisions and mentality. The appendix “List of the Vilnius Album legacy” names all of Zacharczyk’s known works kept in Lithuania and abroad. The topography of this album of Vilnius is reflected in a map of the city with the locations of the photographed images marked. Archival documents and 19th-century periodicals from Lithuania’s, Ukraine’s, Poland’s and Russia’s institutions were used in the preparation of this scholarly publication.

Photographs provide us with the opportunity to return to places in Vilnius that no longer exist or are unrecognisable in the 21st century, and to witness the landscape of a dramatic segment in the capital’s history.

Reviewers: Algė Andriulytė, Aistė Bimbirytė

Design Edita Namajūnienė

Copy editor Ieva Puluikienė

Digitisation Vaidotas Aukštaitis

Source translators from Polish and Russian:

Dainius Junevičius, Margarita Matulytė

English summary translation

Albina Strunga

Published by the Lithuanian National Museum of Art, 2025

Printed by “Petro ofsetas”

300 copies

172 p.

ISBN 978-609-426-216-6