LATVIJA.FM
Strenči: A Small Town’s History in 13,000 Glass Negatives
On the banks of the Gauja in northern Latvia, Strenči became the subject of an unusually extensive photographic record. Around 13,000 surviving glass negatives preserve portraits, timber rafting, family celebrations, floods and new technology. Created by Dāvis Spunde and his successors, the collection is held by the Latvian Museum of Photography and recognised in Latvia’s national UNESCO Memory of the World register. Its images reveal how one small community worked, socialised and changed during the first half of the twentieth century.
A Community Recorded Across Decades
Schoolchildren, wedding parties, sports gatherings and funerals all appear in the photographic record of Strenči. So do the practical tasks of a growing settlement: paving streets, putting up buildings and dealing with the aftermath of floods. The collection even includes images of solar eclipses. These subjects give the collection its particular character. The people in front of the camera inhabit a recognisable local world, with work, institutions and social occasions documented alongside family life.
Strenči stands beside the Gauja in Vidzeme, Latvia’s northern historical region. Its photographic workshop preserved an unusually substantial record of the town and its surroundings during the first half of the twentieth century. The surviving collection comprises around 13,000 glass negatives, now held in Riga.
The breadth of this material makes it possible to examine several kinds of history together. A photograph may provide evidence of clothing and domestic customs, while another records changes to streets or workplaces. Across the collection, ordinary local experience becomes part of the documented history of Latvia, with the small town itself providing the continuity between different subjects.
The Photographer, the Poet and the Krauklis Family
Dāvis Spunde established the Strenči photographic workshop in 1909. Five years later, he took on Jānis Krauklis as an apprentice. Krauklis would become known in Latvian literature as Jānis Ziemeļnieks, giving the workshop a connection to the country’s cultural history that extends beyond photography.
Jānis’s brother Konrāds also trained in the workshop. In the mid-1930s, Spunde sold the business to him, while continuing to photograph local people and events on location. Their sister Paulīne Kraukle worked as a photographer too, and Konrāds’s wife, Elza Alvīne Kraukle, later continued the photographic work. The archive therefore emerged from a succession of practitioners within one working environment.
This shared history affects how the images are understood today. Individual photographs cannot always be confidently assigned to a particular maker. The collection is best approached as the work of the Strenči workshop and its photographers, unless a specific attribution is established. Its continuity depended on skills passing between colleagues and family members over decades, through both studio commissions and photography undertaken around the town.
Glass Plates, Daylight and Painted Scenery
The material named in the collection’s title is also part of its history. A glass negative is a sheet of glass bearing an image formed in a light-sensitive coating. After exposure and development, the negative can be used to make positive prints. The surviving plates preserve both images and evidence of the technology used to produce them.
Spunde’s modernised workshop, built at 17 Rīgas Street in 1913, incorporated glazing in the roof so that light could be controlled during portrait sessions. Painted scenery helped create the setting around the sitter. One surviving winter backdrop was commissioned by Spunde from the Latvian artist Indriķis Zeberiņš.
The backdrop shows how several crafts met inside a provincial studio: photography, painting, the arrangement of a portrait and the management of daylight. In November and December 2023, the Latvian Museum of Photography reconstructed the workshop’s interwar salon in an exhibition centred on this winter scene, using authentic equipment and furnishings. Visitors could see the working environment behind pictures that are often encountered today as isolated historical images.
Timber Rafting and the Transformation of Strenči
Strenči’s relationship with the Gauja helps explain why so much of the archive concerns work. Woodcutters and timber rafters began settling here in the second half of the eighteenth century. The opening of a railway station in 1889 encouraged further growth, and Strenči received town rights in 1928, while the photographic workshop was already well established.
The workshop’s cameras recorded timber rafting and agricultural labour, together with construction, electrification and flood recovery. These are useful subjects for understanding how regional livelihoods and new infrastructure coexisted. Newly installed utility poles, for example, appear among the images selected for the photobook Glass Strenči. Technological change is visible at the scale of a street and the people using it.
Recreational scenes beside the water also appear in the collection, alongside demanding physical work. This combination gives the photographs a wider place in Latvian social history. They connect the development of a Vidzeme town with the use of forests, waterways and transport, while retaining the particular activities and settings through which those changes were experienced.
From the Workshop Attic to UNESCO Recognition
The negatives survived for years in the attic of the Strenči workshop. Roof repairs in 2004 brought them to renewed attention, and that summer they entered the collection of the Latvian Museum of Photography. Mārcis Bendiks and the property company Latio helped arrange their transfer from the workshop’s heir, while Latvia’s Ministry of Culture and Latio supported the acquisition.
This transfer placed the plates within a public collection, where they could be preserved, studied and used in exhibitions and publications. The Latvian Museum of Photography is a division of the Museum of the History of Riga and Navigation.
On 14 October 2021, the collection was admitted to the Latvian National Register of UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme. A formal recognition event followed in March 2022. The programme concerns documentary heritage: the historical value of records and the importance of preserving and making them accessible. For Strenči, the designation acknowledged the significance of an extensive local photographic record within Latvia’s national memory.
Glass Strenči Reaches an International Audience
The archive found a new form in Glass Strenči, published in 2019 by the artists’ collective Orbīta in collaboration with the Latvian Museum of Photography. Anna Volkova selected and sequenced the images and wrote the introduction; she edited the book with Vladimirs Svetlovs. Aleksejs Muraško designed the volume, which also includes an essay by historian Kirill Kobrin.
Almost one hundred photographs were selected from the much larger archive. Their subjects include families and labourers, picnics, parades, farmland and hospitals. Presented across large pages, the images allow details within group scenes and working environments to receive sustained attention. The book offers a particular selection and arrangement of the collection, bringing photographs made for different purposes into a connected visual account.
In 2020, Glass Strenči was shortlisted for PhotoBook of the Year at the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards. That international recognition brought the workshop’s material into a contemporary discussion of photography and book design. A collection rooted in one Latvian community had become the basis of a publication considered alongside photobooks from around the world.
The Images Return to Their Place of Origin
The workshop building itself became an exhibition venue again in 2023. From 27 August to 3 September, Before the Spruce Falls occupied the former studio at 17 Rīgas Street. Curated by Anna Volkova, it combined photographs printed from the museum’s scans with objects found in the premises that spring and a contemporary work made with newly produced glass negatives.
The exhibition developed from a specific discovery: a negative showing a riverside scene with a falling spruce tree. A version of that scene had been painted as a studio backdrop and appeared behind different portrait sitters. Bringing the surviving image together with the studio’s portraits revealed a practical connection between a local landscape, painted scenery and the photographs made indoors.
Spunde’s work continued to appear in the town’s cultural programme, including an exhibition of large-format photographs at Strenči Cultural Centre in April 2026. The collection remains useful because it connects documented places and activities with the people who lived there. Its preservation keeps a substantial record of Latvian working practices, family occasions and local change available for research and public interpretation.
Schoolchildren, wedding parties, sports gatherings and funerals all appear in the photographic record of Strenči. So do the practical tasks of a growing settlement: paving streets, putting up buildings and dealing with the aftermath of floods. The collection even includes images of solar eclipses. These subjects give the collection its particular character. The people in front of the camera inhabit a recognisable local world, with work, institutions and social occasions documented alongside family life.
Strenči stands beside the Gauja in Vidzeme, Latvia’s northern historical region. Its photographic workshop preserved an unusually substantial record of the town and its surroundings during the first half of the twentieth century. The surviving collection comprises around 13,000 glass negatives, now held in Riga.
The breadth of this material makes it possible to examine several kinds of history together. A photograph may provide evidence of clothing and domestic customs, while another records changes to streets or workplaces. Across the collection, ordinary local experience becomes part of the documented history of Latvia, with the small town itself providing the continuity between different subjects.
The Photographer, the Poet and the Krauklis Family
Dāvis Spunde established the Strenči photographic workshop in 1909. Five years later, he took on Jānis Krauklis as an apprentice. Krauklis would become known in Latvian literature as Jānis Ziemeļnieks, giving the workshop a connection to the country’s cultural history that extends beyond photography.
Jānis’s brother Konrāds also trained in the workshop. In the mid-1930s, Spunde sold the business to him, while continuing to photograph local people and events on location. Their sister Paulīne Kraukle worked as a photographer too, and Konrāds’s wife, Elza Alvīne Kraukle, later continued the photographic work. The archive therefore emerged from a succession of practitioners within one working environment.
This shared history affects how the images are understood today. Individual photographs cannot always be confidently assigned to a particular maker. The collection is best approached as the work of the Strenči workshop and its photographers, unless a specific attribution is established. Its continuity depended on skills passing between colleagues and family members over decades, through both studio commissions and photography undertaken around the town.
Glass Plates, Daylight and Painted Scenery
The material named in the collection’s title is also part of its history. A glass negative is a sheet of glass bearing an image formed in a light-sensitive coating. After exposure and development, the negative can be used to make positive prints. The surviving plates preserve both images and evidence of the technology used to produce them.
Spunde’s modernised workshop, built at 17 Rīgas Street in 1913, incorporated glazing in the roof so that light could be controlled during portrait sessions. Painted scenery helped create the setting around the sitter. One surviving winter backdrop was commissioned by Spunde from the Latvian artist Indriķis Zeberiņš.
The backdrop shows how several crafts met inside a provincial studio: photography, painting, the arrangement of a portrait and the management of daylight. In November and December 2023, the Latvian Museum of Photography reconstructed the workshop’s interwar salon in an exhibition centred on this winter scene, using authentic equipment and furnishings. Visitors could see the working environment behind pictures that are often encountered today as isolated historical images.
Timber Rafting and the Transformation of Strenči
Strenči’s relationship with the Gauja helps explain why so much of the archive concerns work. Woodcutters and timber rafters began settling here in the second half of the eighteenth century. The opening of a railway station in 1889 encouraged further growth, and Strenči received town rights in 1928, while the photographic workshop was already well established.
The workshop’s cameras recorded timber rafting and agricultural labour, together with construction, electrification and flood recovery. These are useful subjects for understanding how regional livelihoods and new infrastructure coexisted. Newly installed utility poles, for example, appear among the images selected for the photobook Glass Strenči. Technological change is visible at the scale of a street and the people using it.
Recreational scenes beside the water also appear in the collection, alongside demanding physical work. This combination gives the photographs a wider place in Latvian social history. They connect the development of a Vidzeme town with the use of forests, waterways and transport, while retaining the particular activities and settings through which those changes were experienced.
From the Workshop Attic to UNESCO Recognition
The negatives survived for years in the attic of the Strenči workshop. Roof repairs in 2004 brought them to renewed attention, and that summer they entered the collection of the Latvian Museum of Photography. Mārcis Bendiks and the property company Latio helped arrange their transfer from the workshop’s heir, while Latvia’s Ministry of Culture and Latio supported the acquisition.
This transfer placed the plates within a public collection, where they could be preserved, studied and used in exhibitions and publications. The Latvian Museum of Photography is a division of the Museum of the History of Riga and Navigation.
On 14 October 2021, the collection was admitted to the Latvian National Register of UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme. A formal recognition event followed in March 2022. The programme concerns documentary heritage: the historical value of records and the importance of preserving and making them accessible. For Strenči, the designation acknowledged the significance of an extensive local photographic record within Latvia’s national memory.
Glass Strenči Reaches an International Audience
The archive found a new form in Glass Strenči, published in 2019 by the artists’ collective Orbīta in collaboration with the Latvian Museum of Photography. Anna Volkova selected and sequenced the images and wrote the introduction; she edited the book with Vladimirs Svetlovs. Aleksejs Muraško designed the volume, which also includes an essay by historian Kirill Kobrin.
Almost one hundred photographs were selected from the much larger archive. Their subjects include families and labourers, picnics, parades, farmland and hospitals. Presented across large pages, the images allow details within group scenes and working environments to receive sustained attention. The book offers a particular selection and arrangement of the collection, bringing photographs made for different purposes into a connected visual account.
In 2020, Glass Strenči was shortlisted for PhotoBook of the Year at the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards. That international recognition brought the workshop’s material into a contemporary discussion of photography and book design. A collection rooted in one Latvian community had become the basis of a publication considered alongside photobooks from around the world.
The Images Return to Their Place of Origin
The workshop building itself became an exhibition venue again in 2023. From 27 August to 3 September, Before the Spruce Falls occupied the former studio at 17 Rīgas Street. Curated by Anna Volkova, it combined photographs printed from the museum’s scans with objects found in the premises that spring and a contemporary work made with newly produced glass negatives.
The exhibition developed from a specific discovery: a negative showing a riverside scene with a falling spruce tree. A version of that scene had been painted as a studio backdrop and appeared behind different portrait sitters. Bringing the surviving image together with the studio’s portraits revealed a practical connection between a local landscape, painted scenery and the photographs made indoors.
Spunde’s work continued to appear in the town’s cultural programme, including an exhibition of large-format photographs at Strenči Cultural Centre in April 2026. The collection remains useful because it connects documented places and activities with the people who lived there. Its preservation keeps a substantial record of Latvian working practices, family occasions and local change available for research and public interpretation.
Cover image: Lūcija Zamaiča c. 1930. Author unknown. Public domain. Colorized by the Latvija.fm editorial team.