Family Archive

A meeting with Barbara Romer, the granddaughter of Witold Romer, a prominent Lviv scholar and master of photography. Barbara Romer will visit Lviv for the first time, and during the meeting she will present the archive of photographs kept by her family.

Witold Romer's archive was discovered relatively recently. Until now, researchers were only aware of the published works and those kept in the Wrocław National Museum. Less than a decade ago, Barbara Romer discovered a collection of thousands of her grandfather's photographs in her family home. Most of the materials were negatives that required immediate processing, so the first thing she did was to have them examined and create a detailed description and catalogue of the works. The meeting with Barbara Romer was an excellent opportunity to talk about the heritage and significance of the Romer family for Lviv, as well as the possibilities of representing this collection in Lviv.

The value of this collection is beyond any doubt. For a long time Witold Romer was a central figure in the circle of Lviv photographers, heading the Institute of Photography at Lviv Polytechnic, and in the late 1930s he became president of the Lviv Photographic Society. Outside of his creative hobbies, Romer was a scientist and studied chemistry. He defended his doctorate and worked as the head of the photomechanical department at the Książnica-Atlas publishing house, owned by his father. While studying modern methods of printing maps, he invented isogelation, a tone-separating method of printing photographs. During the Second World War, he immigrated to England, where he was engaged in aerial photography in the British Air Force. After the war, Witold Romer moved to Wrocław and continued his research at the University of Technology.

Entrance to the meeting is by invitation only.

Credits

Cover Image: Witold Romer, "Start", 1939 / National Museum in Wrocław