Edita Povilaitytė-Leliugienė (PDF)
https://doi.org/10.53631/DIS/2016.7.5
The article reviews photography documenting cultural heritage studies, management work and the changing creative strategies for making such images. The text focuses on photographs of the Vilnius Upper Castle with captured explorations and conservation and restoration works of this object of cultural heritage. The documentary photographs were taken by Mironas and Leonas Butkowski (the album was compiled in 1906), Jan Bułhak (1930), Kazimieras Vilkas (1933–34) and Władysław Paszkowski (1935–36). In 1906, for the first time in the history of conservation and restoration of Vilnius Upper Castle, the Butkowski brothers and photographers compiled an album of 10 images documenting the heritage management works in 1895 and 1905. Photographs supplement the data in the written documentation, enabling us to estimate the importance and scale of the conservation work performed to protect the object against further decay. Bułhak, one of the most authoritative figures of the first half of the 20th century, had exclusive rights to document the architectural-archaeological explorations performed in Vilnius Upper Castle in 1930. In his photographs, Bułhak focused on artistic aspects and lacked attention to the details of architectural findings or their entirety.
However, the discourse of the images completely changed when engineers, architects and technicians took cameras into their hands. They managed to capture the daily and social aspects of heritage management. The photographs by Vilkas and Paszkowski and the captured exploration and management activities of Vilnius Upper Castle opened a broader perspective for the quality and quantity analyses of architectural explorations, conservation and restoration works. In addition, textual documents from the first half of the 20th century and photographs have revealed that an image can also create a narrative. An image can remain a silent document in which information important for today’s research has been concealed unconsciously. Thus, photography is important for the history of heritage protection explorations, first of all for the objectivity of information. It allows a contemporary researcher to reconstruct and figure out the condition of the architectural heritage of the period captured in the photograph and to make some assumptions about the quality of the heritage management works performed. By comparing photographs from several periods, a statistical analysis can explain the dynamics of the decay, conservation and restoration works of a given object.
Keywords: conservation, restoration, architecture, Jan Bułhak, Kazimieras Vilkas, Władysław Paszkowski