Leon Barszczewski (1849-1910) – photographer, traveller, explorer of Central Asian cultures. Leon Barszczewski was born in Warsaw on 20 February 1849. After the premature death of his parents, he was taken under the care of Russian government and sent to a cadet school in Kiev, which determined the course of his life – he enlisted the tsarist Russia army. In the years 1876-1897 he served in Samarkand, where he undertook expeditions, among others to Bukhara Emirate, Badakshan and Darvaz khanates. The territories explored by Leon Barszczewski are largely part of the current Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, but also Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan.
Barszczewski always took a camera with him on his expeditions. Thanks to what he recorded on glass negatives, we can now admire the landscape and architecture of Bukhara Emirate, the portraits of its people, take a peek at their activities and everyday life. He managed to capture many portraits of men in colourful costumes, genre scenes and unique portraits of women. In previously unexplored territories, he was often the first European ever seen by the locals. His interest in people, tolerance and friendly attitude towards the local population allowed him to quickly gain trust and respect of the natives, he wrote down local legends, folk tales and beliefs. Leon Barszczewski’s photographs were noticed and appreciated – they won gold medals at the photography exhibition in Paris in 1895 (for images of Asian glaciers) and another one in Warsaw in 1901 (“for the landscapes and Eastern genre scenes”). Leon Barszczewski can undoubtedly be considered a pioneer of reportage photography. The traveller’s collection of photography is the only such iconographic documentation of central Asian territories of the end of the 19th century in Poland.