The Photography Museum ended the year by supplementing its exhibit funds with a particularly rare and valuable collection of photographs – an album of 22 photographs by the famous Hungarian photographer Antalis Rohrbach (1825-1899), including five two-part and two four-part panoramic photographs. Acquired from a private collection, the album contains the oldest known photos of Kaunas, some of the first views of Vilnius, previously unseen images of other localities, engineering railway structures that are historically close to Lithuania.

The Photography Museum learned about this unique relic of Lithuanian iconography from the researches and publications of a photography historian Dainius Junevičius, which took museum professionals to Madrid, the capital of Spain. The album was kept in a private collection of Rosalind Williams, an independent photography curator. After several years of negotiations and searches for funding, when the Lithuanian Council for Culture supported the project on acquisition of cultural valuables of the Šiauliai Aušra Museum, with the assistance of the Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania in the Kingdom of Spain, the album was finally returned to Lithuania.

The purchased album and 14 photographs of A. Rohrbach, which fell into the collections of the Photography Museum earlier, are currently the only works of this author in Lithuania. Other collections containing images of Lithuanian localities are preserved in the National Museum in Warsaw, in Poland, and in the National Library of Spain. These collections are of lower value and smaller in volume, and the images in them mostly repeat the photographs acquired by the museum.

Antalis Rohrbach, a pharmacist who has chosen a craft of photography, was known for his photographic abilities not only in his native land, but also in Europe. While photographing the construction works of railway bridges in Hungarian cities, the author quickly became (and thereby entered the history of photography) a master of large-format panoramic images and a skilled photo-documenter of the creation and construction of these complex structures. He distinguished himself by the ability to skilfully combine five or more images into one, this way creating the integrity and depth of the panoramic image. The reputation earned by photographing bridges determined that specialists of the international capital Great Russian Railway Company, registered in France, offered A. Rohrbach to travel with them to the Russian Empire and record the engineering structures of the section of the St. Petersburg-Warsaw railway line built by their construction company there. In this mission, he spent a lot of time in Vilnius and Kaunas. During his stay, he created unique panoramas of these cities as well as the construction of Rēzekne, Daugavpils, Gardin bridges and cityscapes. This way, two photo albums that are known today were created, one of which is kept in Lithuania from now on.