Album of the Tatra Mountains

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The discovery and popularization of the Tatra Mountains occurred on the wave of wider transnational phenomena: the emergence of voluntary societies and regional museums, the development and institutionalization of academic disciplines (archeology, anthropology, geography, natural sciences).

In the second half of the 19th century with the construction and development of railway networks, the slow rise and institutionalization of tourism and with the growing vogue for mountaineering, specialized clubs were established across Europe: the London Alpine Club inaugurated in 1857, followed six years later by the Viennese, Bernese and Turin ones and by numerous other mountaineer clubs founded across Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy and France as well as on the other side of the Atlantic in the next dozen years. The Tatras were in the focus of the activity of two associations established in 1873 – the Hungarian Carpathian Society and the Polish Tatra Society. While the alpine clubs strictly collaborated with each other and followed similar patterns and paths in their initiatives and activities – the building of mountain paths and shelters, the publishing of mountain maps and travel books, meteorological research etc. – they have contributed to the nationalization of mountain regions and to their growing importance in the shaping of national and regional identities. Thus, for example the Hungarian and Polish societies framed the Tatras in a distinctive – Hungarian and Polish – national focus in the first place.

Photographic surveys were among the first initiatives undertaken by both clubs. Around 1870 on both sides of the Tatra two professional photographers launched independently from each other systematic photographic surveys of the high mountains’ highlights. Károly Divald who run a photographic studio in Eperjes (Prešov), the mountain village in the Kingdom of Hungary, explored the Hungarian side; Awit Szubert, who had a branch of his Cracow photographic studio in the Galician thermal mountain village of Szczawnica – traversed the Polish one. Giving the costs of such projects, both photographers depended on financial support and on a good distribution network of the photographic outcomes. Relaying on the collodion wet plate process, which had to be completed before the wet glass plate dried, they had to carry along the heavy and fragile photographic equipment. This required the hiring of a team of local mountaineers: guides and a number of porters. For Szubert, who travelled with up to six mountaineers, the daily costs of just the workforce amounted to 10-15 guldens, for Divald, who hired up to twenty people they were even higher. Thus, the establishment of the Polish and Hungarian alpine clubs constituted an important opportunity for the continuation of both surveys. In 1876 Szubert received from the Tatra Society a subsidy for the survey and his photographs were subsequently advertised and sold in cycles by the club. Moreover, they served as showcase: bound in albums they were exchanged with other alpine clubs, shown along with maps and publications at international exhibitions, such as the 1875 International Geographical Congress in Paris or the 1882 International Alpine Congress in Salzburg. A set in a wooden box carved by the adepts of the Woodcarving School in Zakopane presented in 1887 to the crown prince Rudolph formed a symbolic summary of the Society’s aims: the study and popularization of the landscape and nature of the Polish Tatra and the promotion of local crafts. Between 1876 and 1878 Szubert made fifty-nine Tara views, which up to the turn of the century were sold as cycles or single photographs. Between 1899 and 1906 from the initiative of the Society twenty-five of them were published as a heliographic album in the Vienna printing workshop Paulussen&Co Kunstanstalt für Photo-Gravure and presented to more than 1500 members of the club. This initiative not only contributed to a wide popularization of the Tatra mountains among Polish intelligentsia and nobility, but also to the enduring of its image shown in Szubert’s photographic survey. Of course, his was just one among the many photographic projects undertaken in the 1870s by alpine clubs across Europe to capture and popularize the image of popular mountain ranges. For example, Divald’s views since 1873 were bound into albums and distributed by the Carpathian Society.

Szubert was not the first photographer to take the challenge of capturing the Polish Tatra. As early as in 1859 Walery Rzewuski one of the first professional photographers in Cracow made several views which were than copied in xylography and published in the “Tygodnik Ilustrowany”, a popular Polish illustrated magazine. A year later the mountains were photographed by Meletiusz Dutkiewicz, assistant in the studio of Ludwig Angerer. The latter foresaw the emerging fashion for this mountain range, however Dutkiewicz’s views were never commercialized and today they are hardly known from few preserved copies. Accordingly, a successful and systematic survey of the Tatra was only possible with the combination of the photographer’s skills and passion with the aims of an alpine club and the opportunities provided by it. For Divald and Szubert the surveys were not just a photographic enterprise, but constituted a realization of a passion for and interest in the mountains. Divald was one of the founding members of the Carpathian Society and Szubert, who began to cooperate with the Tatra Society in the first months after its founding, soon became its member.