#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.

Virtual Tour

Exhibitions

„Soviet Moldova: Between Myths and the Gulag”

Exhibition of the Museum of the Victims of Deportations and Political Repressions

This is the first exhibition of the Museum of the Victims of Deportations and Political Repressions, which is a branch of the National Museum of History of Moldova. The exhibition presents phenomenon of totalitarianism in the general historical context of the Soviet era. By using specific museum means authors of the exhibition have tried to present to the public two components of Soviet society: the illusory world of the adherents of the "Soviet Dream", who naively believed in the ideals of freedom and justice, the "bright future" depicted by Soviet propaganda, and the world of those who had to know the hell of communist camps and prisons.

The exhibition brings together about 700 museum pieces: photographs, documents, letters from Siberia, posters of those years, personal belongings of former deportees and political prisoners, lists of confiscated property, memoirs of witnesses and survivors of the Soviet Gulag. There are exhibited for the first time some materials and documents from former KGB archives referring to the persons subjected to repressions for their political and religious beliefs.

According to incomplete data, from 1920 to 1951 in MASSR and MSSR 31,677 people were convicted for "political crimes", of whom more than five thousand were sentenced to death. Other three thousand people have died in prison.

About 60,000 people were deported during the three deportations nationwide: June 1941, July 1949, and 1 April 1951.

Objects presented in the museum exhibition "Soviet Moldova: Between Myths and the Gulag" tell us about the tragedy of these people with incredible destinies.

It is not an ordinary exhibition, but a small memorial of pain and humiliation of the victims of the Great Terror, an exhibition that reminds contemporaries about totalitarian communist past, the past that we should know, which must remain in history and never repeat.

Exhibition „Soviet Moldova: Between Myths and the Gulag”