Kraków, J. Bułhak – the market square and the Cloth Hall in a photograph from 1925.

[KRAKOW—Main Square and the Cloth Hall—panoramic photograph]. [1925]. Photograph, size 16.5x11.5 cm, by JanBułhak in Vilnius.
It depicts a view from the tower of the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In the lower right corner is the imprint: “J. Bułhak Vilnius.” The photograph is part of the author’s series “Poland in the Photographs of Jan Bułhak.” On the reverse, a stamp reads: “LA POLOGNE en images photogr. de J. Bułhak. No. 4240 KRAKOW / J. Bułhak. Photo Artist. Vilnius, Jagiellońska 8 / The collection contains 6,000 images / Copyright by J. Bułhak Vilnius 1925" and a handwritten identification in ink, in Italian. In very good condition.
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 ZPAF after World War II. He established his first studio at the urging of Ferdynand Ruszczyc. For a time, he worked at 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. These themes became central to his 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 from the Vilnius region. He was also the author of many textbooks on the aesthetics and techniques of photography and regional studies, as well as the initiator of historical research on photography.