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Kel’s son, Gegë Marubbi (1907) who had continued
his father’s work, gave the entire collection of negatives
from the Studio Marubbi, with a span of almost hundred
years (1864–1952), to the Albanian Country. In 2005,
UNESCO and its Italian-founded PASARP program
started the process of digitizing about 240,000 negatives,
glasses and fi lms of this collection.
Kolë Idromeno (1860–1939), one of the leading
painters of realism, had also a studio for photography
in Shkodra. He printed numerous postcards, notably in
Austria and Germany at the turn of the century.
Bosnia and Herzegovina
According to the latest research, the oldest existing
photograph was taken in Sarajevo in 1855, and its author
was Georg Knežević. It is a photograph of a bride and
bridegroom (Jaša and Gavrilo Jelić), who were both
from families of tradesmen, and were thus members of
the middle class in a society that was still feudal. Georg
Knežević was a traveling photographer, who worked
fi rst in Budapest, then Novi Sad, Segedin, Belgrade,
Sarajevo and fi nally in Zadar. He combined the form
of carte-de-visite with paper negatives printed on salted
paper when making portraits in his improvised atelier,
but in his senior works he used wet plates and albumen
paper. He regularly visited Sarajevo for longer periods
of time, of which a number of private collections of
photographs give evidence. Although he was a travel-
ing photographer, Knežević wrote his name, surname,
profession and location both on the back and on the
front of his photographs in Cyrillic letters.
During the insurrections in Herzegovina in 1875–
1878, came a traveling photographer named Silvio S.
Maskarić from Dubrovnik. He made many portraits of
the insurgents, as well as of the refugees who found
shelter in Dubrovnik’s surroundings. Beside wet plates,
he also used the ambrotype technique.
With the arrival of the Austro-Hungarian army in
1878, many traveling and offi cial photographers came
to the area. Traveling with the army, their photographs
were often of executions and other military subjects but
they usually lack the signature of their authors.
The fi rst permanent studio for photography was
opened in Sarajevo by Anton Shadler who came from
Vienna in 1878. Another photographer, František Franjo
Topič came to Sarajevo as a representative of the Vien-
nese Court Art Institute C. Angerer and Goshl. He was
very active as an outdoor photographer until 1905 and
he published many photographs in the offi cial annual of
Provincial Government “Bosnian” (Bošnjak).
The National Museum (Zemaljski muzej Bosne
i Hercegovine) was founded in 1885 and from 1891
it published its illustrated “Annual” (Glasnik) with
photographs of Ćiro Truhelka, the director of the Mu-
seum and of A. Weinwurm, photographer. In the book
“Durch Bosnien und die Herzegowina kreuz und quer”
(Through Bosnia and Herzegovina along and across),
Berlin 1897, an eminent number of Weinwurm’s photos
was included.
At the end of the 19th century, there were many
photographers in Bosnia and Herzegovina from all the
countries within the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy: G. E.
Abinum, Emanuel Buchwald, Ignaz Lederer, A. Viditz,
Stefan Ossko and A. Hoiger working in Sarajevo, Ott-
mar Rebaglio and Johan Patzelt in Banja Luka, Anton
Kuzcento in Livno, Julius Zenter in Brčko, Vladimir
Merćep in Bileća and Cisar Leopold in Bosanska
Krupa.
The fi rst amateur photographer and mountaineering
reporter was doctor Radivoje Simonović from Sombor,
who climbed Herzegovina’s mountains in 1888, and
some of his photographs were published in the magazine
“Nova Iskra” (New Spark) from Belgrade.Bulgaria
The fi rst photographers in Bulgaria were foreign travel-
ing photographers that came in the middle of the 19th
century. They were mostly French, Austrian, Hungar-
ian and German. The oldest existing photograph was
made by a traveling photographer in 1851 in the town
Šumen, and it represents an orchestra founded by Mihail
Šafran, an immigrant from Hungary and participant of
the revolution of 1851.
Before he founded the most prominent studio for
photography in Sofi a in 1878, Anastas Karastojanov
(1822–1880) was the court photographer of the Crown-
Prince Mihailo Obrenović in Belgrade under the name of
Anastas N. Stojanović, as it was printed on the reverses
of his cartes-de-visite from 1863. Being a participant
of the Bulgarian national revival (Vazrazdane), he made
dozens of portraits of the prominent insurgents. He also
used the wet plates technique when he documented
the spectacle organized in the streets of Belgrade on
the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Obrenović
dynasty and of the uprisings for the liberation from
Turkey. His sons Ivan and Dimitar had continued the
work at the studio “Braća Karastojanovi” in Sofi ja, and
it had been prosperous from 1878 until the middle of
the 20th century.
Ivan Stojanov Papazov-Zografov, learned to paint
icons at the Holy Mountain, fi rst, and around the year
1860, he began making photographic portraits as well
as icons in Panaguriste. Because of the fact that he
participated in the April’s insurrection, he and his wife
received the capital punishment, and his studio for
photography was destroyed. We can judge his work
only by a remaining family album with photographs.
Stojan Karaleev was also both a painter of icons and a