#Exhibit of the Month

The main parts of the camera include the body, bellows, lens, and viewfinder system. The body consists of two lacquered walnut wood frames, joined by a folding black textile bellows that allows the necessary extension for focusing. On the front panel is the Agfa anastigmat lens, mounted in a Compur-type shutter produced by F. Deckel in Munich. It features a foldable "brilliant" viewfinder for both portrait and landscape orientation. It uses glass photographic plates coated with a photographic emulsion, mounted in walnut wood holders, with a frame size of 9x12 cm.
The walnut wood model, considered the flagship "Agfa Isolar Luxus," was designed by the A.H. Rietzschel factory in Munich, acquired by AGFA in 1925, which continued producing this type of camera under its own name until the late 1920s.
The piece was restored by Mihail Culașco, Restoration Department of NMHM.
Brief History of the Camera
The history of the camera spans 200 years, evolving from the camera obscura to today's digital devices. Key milestones include: the first permanent photograph in 1826 by French physicist Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, using a wooden box and a plate coated with bitumen of Judea; the invention of the first photographic process - daguerreotype - in 1839 by Frenchman Louis Daguerre, marking the official birth of photography; the invention of calotype, based on the negative/positive principle, by British physicist and chemist Fox Talbot; the invention of wet collodion plates by Englishman Frederick Scott Archer and dry glass plates by Richard Leach Maddox and John Huds Bennet; the introduction of flexible roll film and the launch of the first Kodak camera by American inventor George Eastman; the release of the first 35 mm film camera by German company "Leica"; the launch of the first instant camera "Polaroid," invented by American Edwin Land. Finally, starting in 1975, this path led to the digital photography revolution. Each successive step made cameras smaller and faster, significantly improving image quality.
The first photographic studio in Chișinău was opened in 1854 by Eduard Glewski, and before World War I, there were already about 100 photography studios in Bessarabia.
The collection of the National Museum of History of Moldova includes over 30 cameras, made in Austria, Germany, France, USSR, Japan, and China, dating from the late 19th century to the 2000s. Among them are folding bellows cameras, BOX-type cameras, single-lens reflex (SLR) and twin-lens reflex (TLR) cameras, as well as digital (DSLR) cameras.

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Exhibitions

“ArheOS
- when anthropologist and archaeologists make bones to speak”

June 13 - November 10, 2019

"Archeology is anthropology or nothing" used to say the famous American archaeologists Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips in 1958, thus theorizing a course of research in archeology that, although understood by many, was practiced by very few. The two set the objectives of archaeological research as studying and solving human, cultural and social problems, and anthropology became a tool of obtaining that information and knowledge.

In complex archaeological research, absolutely all recovered fragments are important, whether they represent the results of human activity - artifacts (ceramics, clothing and ornaments, tools made of different materials, weapons, etc.) or osteological material itself. Their interdisciplinary research provides additional data to help complete the daily picture and work of the past.

This exhibition, which brings together archeological artifacts of particular importance, through the sum of their knowledge and osteological materials of special significance, represents a "bridge" through which today's archaeologists and anthropologists "speak" with our predecessors. By analyzing them, we can now know what physical activity they have had, why diseases have suffered and how they have tried to treat some, what were the conditions they lived and what they fed, what rituals they practiced and what has remained behind them. Their histories are fascinating, and their secrets are revealed.

The narrative behind this exhibition was born in the context of extensive research on the human skeleton in recent years, which has often become an avoided subject in different societies. Viewed and accepted differently, often with negative connotations, the skeleton represents for researchers a valuable source of information. Treated and interpreted with great care for all the details, it helps to reconstitute scenes and aspects of the lives of long gone human communities.

The exhibition presents, in chronological order, funerary complexes from the Paleolithic to the Middle Ages, associated with the inventory of graves, sometimes richer, sometimes more austere, defining and representative for the periods concerned. The most spectacular cases recorded by archaeological and anthropological science are highlighted: skulls with intentional ritual deformations, skulls with traces of "surgical" interventions, bones with traces of pathologies or traumas, are the messengers through which we are now closer to the life, activity, spirituality and beliefs of the past.

The concern for the body manifested more or less by man, has left legible traces in our bone matrix since old times. Whether it took the form of aesthetic care, whether it was in the curative field, all the actions to which the skeleton was subjected left its mark on the surface or in the structure of the bones.

Communicating with the people of the past becomes even more interesting the more unusual are the stories that are hidden in their bones.

The exhibition project „ArheOS: when anthropologists and archaeologists make bones to speak" is the achievement of an extraordinary team, it is the cumulative effort of some major and important research institutions: National Museum of History of Moldova and the Anthropological Research Center „Olga Necrasov", the Romanian Academy - Iaşi Branch, Romania.

Curators: drd. Mariana Vasilache-Curoșu (Chișinău) and dr. Angela Simalcsik (Iași).