#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

"The Ukrainian universe of Maria Prymachenko in Chisinau"

May 10 – June 30, 2023

The Polish Institute in Bucharest will present on the fence of the National Museum of History of Moldova, an exhibition dedicated to the Ukrainian folk art artist Maria Prymachenko. It is an opportunity for our countries to express their support for Ukraine in these difficult days of the war. The exhibition "Ukrainian Universe of Maria Prymachenko" can be visited from May 10 to June 30, 2023.

The Museum of History and Ethnography in Ivankiv, located in the Kyiv region, burned down during the Russian invasion on February 27, 2022. In its collection were 25 works belonging to the Ukrainian artist Maria Prymachenko. Some of them managed to be saved by the inhabitants of the city, who took them out of the burning building.

The universe of naive painters is broken from reality, full of fantastic creatures and plants. For them, such a way of painting is absolutely normal. For us, however, trained in academic painting, studying a work that requires a lot of our attention and in-depth knowledge of plants, animals, and people challenges us to call upon our own intuition. So let's focus on Maria Prymachenko's paintings. They are beautiful, colourful, full of eccentric creatures and plants. There is nothing accidental in this, as Maria grew up in a family where all its members had artistic talent. Grandmother had specialized in dyeing Easter eggs, father had been an accomplished carpenter, and mother had enjoyed embroidery. All this entourage, the fact that she kept an eye on what her father was doing, the attraction to the ornaments on the embroideries and kilims of her mother's work had a strong impact on her art. In the rich ornamentation of Prymachenko's works, similar to that used in Ukrainian embroideries, we find the fantastic creatures mentioned above. There were voices that attributed their presence to the illness and suffering she went through. Maria had Heine-Medina disease, also called poliomyelitis or infantile paralysis, which undoubtedly had a strong impact on her psyche and affected her entire life, including her physical condition. Because of this, he only completed four primary grades, having practically no chance to become known to the general public.

The artist spent the last eight years of her life confined to bed. He painted, taught and received guests until his last moments. He died on August 18, 1997, in the same village where he was born. She was awarded the "Taras Shevchenko" National Award for services to the art of the USSR, and UNESCO declared 2009 as the Year of Maria Prymachenko. In his memory, a small planet was named "14624 Prymachenko". After visiting an exhibition of Prymachenko's works in Paris, Pablo Picasso said: "I bow before the artistic wonders of this brilliant Ukrainian."

The opening of the exhibition will take place on May 10, at 11:00 a.m., in the courtyard of the museum. The exhibition "Ukrainian Universe of Maria Prymachenko" can be visited on the fence of the National Museum of History of Moldova between May 10 and June 10, 2023, 31 August 1989 street, 121A.