Count Benediktas Henrikas Tiškevičius (1852–1935), who came from Lithuania and spent most of his life in France, but who constantly returned to his native land, was seriously engaged in photography for several decades. He was a member of the French Photographic Society (Société française de photographie) and the Photo-club de Paris (from 1884 and 1895 respectively), a master of pictorial photography, who actively participated in the European photographer movement.
For a long time, it was assumed that all the negatives and prints of the Count's photographs perished in a fire, and his work was judged from the scarce originals and publications in the press published while he was alive. Perhaps that is why B. H. Tiškevičius was a photographer for almost the entire 20th century. It was little known in Europe and remembered only at the end of the century, when the Nicephore Niepce Museum opened in 1993. purchased about 80 originals of his photographs.
It can be considered a miracle that a unique collection of more than five hundred B.H. Tiškevičius's photographs has been preserved in Lithuania thanks to the Lithuanian collector Gediminas Petraičius (1956–2021). This book publishes photos of the collection taken between 1891 and 1899. In France, other Western European countries, Poland, Lithuania, and near the Nalibokaki forest in the former Viala manor in present-day Belarus.
