#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

The compartment “EVOLUTION OF MAN IN PREHISTORIC TIME”

(Permanent Exhibition “History and Civilization”)

The section reflects the aspects of the development of human communities from the Stone Age to the Early Middle Ages. The main thematic components imply diverse aspects of development of the societies, which inhabited the area between Prut and Dniester since the oldest times, and reflect indissoluble relations between people and the environment and evolutionary development of various forms of economy based on cattle-breeding, cultivation of cereals, and practicing of crafts.

Exposed archaeological artefacts (from blades, scrapers, axes, spearheads made of flint, stone, or bone to household pottery, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic vessels, metal arms, objects of worship as well as diverse objects found in hoards) give the visitors a possibility to acquaint themselves with proto-urban civilizations of Cucuteni-Tripolye and Santana de Mures-Chernyakhov, which are extremely significant due to the forms of cultural expression and contribution to historical evolutionary processes in South-Eastern Europe.

Archaeological collections used in the exhibition reveal the emergence, development, and culture of different populations, from the 1st millennium B.C., including the Greek-Roman time; spreading of Christianity in the eastern Carpathian region; complex processes of formation and consolidation of Romanic societies in the period of the great migration of peoples.