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photographer. He learned to paint icons in Kiev where
he also bought a photo-camera around 1870.
Nikifor Nenčev Minkov (1838–1928) gained his fi rst
knowledge of photography in Rumania, and around
1860, he founded a photographic studio in Istanbul
under the name of “Nikifor Konstantinopol.” During
the Russian-Turkish war of 1876, he took panoramic
overviews with military troops and scenes of life behind
battlefi eld.
Toma Hitrov (1840–1906), together with Josif Buresh
opened a photographic studio “Slavjanskata Svelopis-
nica” in Sofi a around 1890. He made portraits, of which
the best ones are those of the cabinet format, but he
also photographed everyday life in the streets of Sofi a.
His portraits of contemporaries (insurgents, prominent
writers, scientists and intellectuals) are very direct
and sincere, and they show the author’s keen sense for
analyzing characters. He remained faithful to the wet
plates technique until the end of the 19th century. He
was one of the fi rst photographers who systematically
documented the landscapes and locations where the key
events of the Bulgarian insurrection took place. At the
beginning of the 20th century, his daughters Ivanka and
Bojka took over the studio. They learned photography
in Dresden and Berlin.
Many foreign photographers had their permanent
studios in bigger Bulgarian towns, only after the lib-
eration, that is to say, at the end of the 19th century.
Some of which are the following: M. Wolf, Fr. Bauer,
O. Markolesko, M. Rekhnitch, J. Buresh, V. Velebni, F.
Grabner, M. Kurtz, etc.
The Collection “Portraits and Photos” kept in the
National Library St. Cyril and Methodius in Sofi a,
consists of over 80.000 photo documents.
Macedonia
In the second half of the 19th century, came a number of
traveling photographers from Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey,
Greece and Austria to the regions of today’s Macedonia.
Authors that are truly essential for the development of
photography as well as for cinematography are beyond
doubt brothers Yanaki and Milton Manaki.
The Manaki Brothers were born in a small village
Avdela, Kostur area, Greece. They started to work to-
gether in 1898. During this time Yanaki (1878–1960)
was a drawing professor in the high school in Yoanina,
where he opened his photo studio with his younger
brother Milton (1882–1964). In 1905 they moved their
studio to Bitola and opened their well-known “Studio for
art photography.” In that period, Bitola was an important
political, economic and cultural center for the Balkans.
At the invitation of King Karol the First, they took part
in the Big World Exhibition in Sinaia-Romania in 1906.
They won a Gold medal for their photo collection and
received the title of court photographers of His Majesty
Karol the First.
Their unique skills and artistry attracted many
outstanding Balkan personalities, including Prince
Mehmed, later to become the sultan of Turkey, King
Karol I of Rumania, as already mentioned, and many of
the legendary insurgents of the Macedonian revolution-
ary units of the uprising against Ottoman’s empire.
The photo-legacy of the Manaki Brothers with 18.513
negatives, of which 7.715 are glass plates, is kept at the
Macedonian State Archive, Regional Dept, Bitola.Serbia
The work of Anastas Jovanović (1817–1899) belongs
to the pioneer age of the calotype process in the Bal-
kans, with more than 800 paper negative and 500 paper
positive pieces, kept in the City’s Museum in Belgrade.
In his Autobiography, he described in detail his fi rst
encounter with daguerreotype and calotype in Vienna
where he was from 1838 as student at the Academy of
St. Ana and later, as photographer and lithographer, until- According to J. M. Eder, an Austrian historian
of photography, Anastas Jovanović practiced calotype
as a member of the group around Anton Martin, the
author of the book Repertorium der Photographie
(1846/8). As many of Jovanović’s portrate calotypes
are dated 1850, it can be asserted that they were part
of the preparations for the publication of Spomenici
Serbski (Serbian Memorials), a series of lithographs of
intellectuals, writers and prominent personalities from
the young Serbian state. The portrait genre stands out
in Jovanović’s photographic opus not only because it
greatly outnumbers all other motifs, but also because
of its exceptionally high artistic merit. His decision to
use close-ups helped him span the distance between his
Voigtlander camera and the model.
The legacy of Anastas Jovanović includes paper
negatives of the streets and squares of old Vienna as well
as the fortress of Petrovaradin on the Danube and the
Library of Belgrade photographed by Petzval’s portrait
lens in 1850, so that parts at the corners of the paper
remained unexposed. He photographs outdoor scenes as
panoramic overview, but searching for dynamic light-
and-dark relations. The body of Jovanović’s calotype
works contains some still-lifes, interiors and reportages
about historic events, such as the withdrawal of the
Turkish army from the Belgrade fortress in 1867. Pho-
tographs of the exteriors that Jovanović made later on
indicate that he, with the process of wet plates, adopted
the conventional style of photographic approach.
The public in Serbia could read about the invention
of daguerreotypes in Magazin za hudožestvo, knjižestvo
i modu (The Magazine for Art, Literature and Fashion)
already in 1839. Another magazine, “Srbske narodne