The Pusłowski Family Photo Albums at MuFo

Name: The Pusłowski Family Photo Albums at MuFo
Start: 2025-09-05
End: 2025-10-26
Location: Museum of Photography in Krakow – MuFo Rakowicka

Sep 5 - Oct 26 2025 ul. Rakowicka 22A

Photo: unknown, three people by a tree, 1907–1908, from the MuFo collection

Photo: unknown, Switzerland, Matterhorn peak and Lake Riffelsee, 1905, from the MuFo collection

Photo: unknown, two boys, 1909, from the MuFo collection

Photo: unknown, Tunis, Bardo, mosque with minaret tower, 1907–1908, from the MuFo collection

Photo: unknown, Tatra Mountains, highlander in the valley, 1904, from the MuFo collection

Photo: unknown, Naples, Mount Vesuvius, 1905, from the MuFo collection

Photo: unknown, boy with dogs on the beach, 1912, from the MuFo collection

The Pusłowski family albums in the collection of the Museum of Photography in Krakow contain over a thousand photographs from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. They document the life of an aristocratic family and its photographic practices. The heterogeneous composition and thematic diversity of these collections create an intriguing, albeit wordless, narrative about the era and its social conditions.

Although the Pusłowski family belonged to a group of distinguished Polish families, their photographic legacy does not resemble the studied, precisely described collections known from the Potocki, Stadnicki, Zamoyski or Tyszkiewicz archives. This family's albums are different – silent, disordered, enigmatic. They stand out not only for their scale (nearly 1,400 photographs), but also for the almost complete lack of descriptions and information about how they were created and who exactly took them.

Photo: unknown, from the MuFo collection.

Perhaps it is this absence that makes the Pusłowski albums so moving. Understatement creates a new space – a place for speculation, interpretation, and stories that are yet to be born. Each viewer can see something different in these photographs: a testimony to everyday life, an act of creative expression, or perhaps an attempt to preserve memory.
The albums contain genre scenes, outdoor and indoor portraits, shots of rooms in a Krakow palace, as well as photos from trips around Poland and Europe – from Warsaw and Zakopane to Dalmatia, France and Algeria. The exhibition at MuFo presents the entire collection of eight albums with commentary. An accompanying multimedia presentation allows visitors to view each of the photographs.

The Pusłowski family's collection of albums was not created with a salon exhibition in mind. These are not typical family albums with representative photographs, but an intimate and unconventional record of an era. This makes them more than just a document – they are ‘proof of existence’, as the curator of the exhibition, Dr Maria Wąchała-Skindzier, describes them. They testify to cultural aspirations, visual sensitivity and openness to the new medium of photography at the time. Although these photographs are amateur in nature, they reveal the artistic awareness of their authors – the spontaneously captured scenes show the tension between staging and randomness.