Sorcerer with a Camera

When in 1976 the State Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw announced the competition "Family Customs in Folk Culture - Love and Marriage", the attention of the competition committee was drawn to a work sent by Kazimierz Głuc, a church administrator from Podegrodzie. His work was illustrated with photographs showing a regional wedding from the beginning of the 20th century by Wojciech Migacz (1874-1944). The church administrator in Podegrodzie spotted them during a pastoral visit to the house of Wojciech's niece. At that time, he obtained a large number of glass negatives, which a relative, unaware of the value of the inheritance, was going to throw into the Dunajec river. The discovery saved an extraordinary photographic collection and sparked interest in the person of a rural amateur photographer. Today, Migacz’s glass plates and photographs are in the collections of, among others, Warsaw's ethnographic museum and the District Museum in Nowy Sącz. They are an invaluable iconographic source and a document of past times.

In „Życiorys Wojciecha Migacza z Gostwicy, L.d. 7” ["Biography of Wojciech Migacz From Gostwica, L.D. 7"], the author, writing about himself in the third person, recalls that "As a lover of photography, he took photographic pictures at his own expense in the pre-war years of the life of the rural people [...] He captured country costumes in photographs [...] He also took single and panoramic landscape photos". At the beginning of the 20th century, the invention of L. Daguerre was still a novelty in the countryside. Photography aroused distrust, reluctance, and often even fear. When Migacz started his photographic activity, the elderly villagers considered him a sorcerer, saying that he knew special prayers thanks to which he could take pictures.  

Wojciech Migacz is one of the few representatives of the peasant trend in Polish photography at the beginning of the 20th century. He came from a peasant family from Gostwica, a village near Nowy Sącz.  He learned the secrets of photography during his stay in Zakopane, where he studied carpentry and turnery at the Imperial-Royal Vocational School of Wood Industry. After returning to Gostwica, photography became his passion and main occupation. With the camera he constructed on glass plates, he documented the life of his native village. He took portrait photos, recorded family celebrations, showed traditional folk costumes, and documented social and political events.