Władysław Bogacki – Photographs
About
Władysław Bogacki was one of the most outstanding Polish photographers of the interwar period, a member of both the Polish Fotoklub and the Association of Polish Art Photographers.
He was born on January 2, 1886, in Kraków, where he also passed away on January 10, 1975. Raised in an artistic family, Bogacki inherited a deep creative legacy. His grandfather, Adam Bogacki, was a painter and sculptor—best known for his celebrated bust of actress Helena Modrzejewska—and also a passionate gardener. His father, Professor Józef Bogacki, was a painter, a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and a student of the great Jan Matejko.
Continuing the family’s artistic tradition, Władysław Bogacki became one of the leading figures of Polish pictorial photography in the interwar years. Although life dealt him an early blow—he was orphaned at the age of 13—he was fortunate to come under the care of Dr. Henryk Jordan, a family friend. Jordan, whose name lives on in the well-known Jordan parks (recreational garden playgrounds), helped shape Bogacki’s future.
Bogacki received a thorough education. He attended the Real School in Kraków, later graduating from the Lviv Polytechnic and the Jagiellonian University with a degree in mathematics. From 1913 to 1966, he worked as a mathematics and descriptive geometry teacher in Kraków’s secondary schools and technical colleges. In 1973, he was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta in recognition of his achievements.
Alongside his academic career, Bogacki nurtured a lifelong passion for photography. He specialized in commemorative and genre scenes, but also documented his foreign travels through landscape and architectural photography. He experimented with stereoscopic photography, leaving behind rare spatial images that offer a vivid glimpse into the past.
From 1911 onward, Bogacki regularly exhibited his work in Poland and abroad, earning numerous awards, honors, diplomas, letters of recognition, and over 50 medals. He joined the Polish Fotoklub in 1937 and, in 1957, was admitted into the Association of Polish Art Photographers.
Unfortunately, much of Bogacki’s most active period as an international exhibitor took place just before the outbreak of World War II. Of the approximately 100 photograms he sent to exhibitions abroad, none were ever returned. A final, devastating blow came in 1939, when the German army destroyed his well-equipped photography studio on Michałowskiego Street in Kraków. Most of his negatives and around 200 photograms were looted, and Bogacki never fully returned to photography after this loss.
Today, his surviving works are held in the collections of the Photography Museum in Janów Lubelski and the Museum of the History of Photography in Kraków, curated by the Kraków Photographic Society, which was named in his honor in 1975.
Event details
When: 1-30 June 2025
Where: The Hartwig Alley
Outdoor exhibition