Kraków 2D

The start of the second decade of the 21st century has marked itself as the day of 3D technology; it has even been used by Wim Wenders, master of European cinema. And yet in certain areas the more traditional two dimensions remain indispensable. 2011 saw the start of the implementation of the project “Providing and Digitalising 2D Collections at the Historical Museum of the City of Kraków”.

The aim of the project, co-financed from EU funds, is to digitalise around eighteen thousand 2D museum items. The majority are photographic materials depicting city landscapes and portraits of its inhabitants. The digitalisation also covers selected archives of Kraków’s 19th- and 20th-century theatre history, as well as sketches showing the city’s past urban and architectural layout.


Main Market Square, ca 1930, photo: Henryk Cytowski; courtesy of the HMK

Digital photography archive
The collection of photos of Kraków, assembled by the museum over the last century, is a priceless iconographic source for research into the city’s history. Over 8,000 items from the Department of Kraków’s Photography will be preserved and shared in their digital format. They include negatives on glass plates and photographic film, as well as old large-format prints which have as yet not been scanned into high-resolution copies. Until recently there has been no suitable equipment and software; this is now available at the digitalisation workshop at the Krzysztofory Palace. Work has been ongoing on the scanning and digital processing of photos, as well as verification of their descriptions. Once the project is completed in 2013, the database will be published online as an internet archive. This is still just a small part of the museum’s photography collections.


Main Market Square, ca 1930, photo: Henryk Cytowski; courtesy of the HMK

Once upon a time in Kraków
Where was the office of Kraków’s famous daily “Czas”? Where on the Main Market Square did our grandmas and great-grandmas wait for a tram? Has there always been a sandbank building up on the bank of the Vistula opposite Wawel? The city is constantly undergoing changes; every day there are a myriad events, not necessarily spectacular. Can we remember what our everyday haunts used to look like last year, a decade ago, twenty years ago? The answers – frequently surprising – can be found in archive photographs.


Non-existent building of daily "Czas” at Planty park , before 1935, photo: Stanisław Kolowca; courtesy of the HMK

The Historical Museum’s oldest city landscapes, captured on glass plates by Ignacy Krieger and Walery Rzewuski, date back to the 1860s and 1870s. Interwar exhibitions and monuments can be found on photos relating to the Stanisław Kolowca’s Industrial Museum. An invaluable source of information about those days are photos taken by photoreporters of the “Światowid” agency for the famous “Illustrated Daily Courier”. The Second World War, life under Nazi occupation and just after liberation by the Red Army – images of those difficult times have also been preserved on photographic film. Henryk Hermanowicz was an unrivalled chronicler of post-war Kraków; for over 30 years (until the early 1980s), armed with his camera, he tirelessly pounded the streets of the Old Town, Kazimierz alleyways and the new estates of Nowa Huta being created in former fields and meadows. Names of renowned Cracovian photographers whose archives found their way into the museum’s care form a long list; however, an equally valuable historical source are private albums, frequently rescued by curators from certain destruction. The museum’s website bears their appeal: “Don’t throw away old photos! If you bring them to our museum, they could become a valuable document of our era for future generations”.


Vistula riverside, ca 1960, photo: Henryk Hermanowicz, courtesy of the HMK

New lives of old photos
The majority of pictures to be digitalised are preserved as negatives, frequently 135mm. Latest technologies allows us to study once again the events recorded on film; after all, each frame features a particular story awaiting discovery. For example, a seemingly dull anonymous photo depicting “a group of unknown people” was revealed as a documentation of a meeting held in 1938 to commemorate the 350th anniversary of Kraków’s Nowodworski High School, famous as Poland’s oldest.


350th anniversary of Kraków’s Nowodworski High School, 1938, photo by unknown author, courtesy of the HMK

All this thanks to a digital enlargement revealing a Maltese Cross on the lapel of a men, the subject of a painting in the background: the founder and existing patron of the school, Bartłomiej Nowodworski, was a Knight of Malta… And so the breadcrumb trail – or, rather the mouse trail on the screen – led to the solution to the riddle of an entire series of photos, and even helped identify individual people. And so the painstaking daily work on creating the future digital online database brings many such small discoveries, fascinating for historians. Perhaps once the currently anonymous archival photos reach the online database, it will become possible to identify growing numbers of photos they depict, and their descendants in the digital age will catch the discovery bug… (Dorota Dziunikowska, "Karnet" monthly)


350th anniversary of Kraków’s Nowodworski High School, 1938, photo by unknown author, courtesy of the HMK (fragment)