#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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Publications

Library „Tyragetia"

Elena Ploșnița

Museographic Concepts of Historical Profile: Retrospect and Prospect

Series “Biblioteca “Tyragetia” XVII, Chisinau, 2008, 248 p. ISBN 978-9975-80-197-3.

The monograph “Museographic Concepts of Historical Profile: Retrospect and Prospect” is a work on an actual and unstudied subject, the synthesis study of museographic concepts on history which dominated in the history of Moldova from the 19th century to the present.

The structure of the work is determined by the specificity of the subject under research. It consists of Preface; arguments; three chapters (“Archaeology and History in Bessarabian Museographic Concepts”, “Creation and Development of Museography of Historical Profile in Moldavian SSR”, “Role of Cultural Policy and Civil Society in Adoption of New Museographic Concepts in Late 20th – Early 21st Centuries”), which are divided into 10 sections; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index of Museographic Concepts; Index of Museums; Index of Proper Names; abstracts in Romanian, English, and Russian; and List of Abbreviations.

The concepts under consideration were identified and systematized on the basis of materials found in the National Archives of the Republic of Moldova, the Archives of the Historical Monuments Department from Bucharest (Romania), the State Archives of the Russian Federation, in the collections and archives of the National Museum of Archaeology and History of Moldova, and the archives of the National Museum of Ethnography and Natural History (Chisinau). The materials, for the most part, have not previously been investigated.

The studies revealed that each historical period of development of the Moldavian society since the late 19th century gave rise to (and was marked by) certain museographic concepts and, at the same time, these concepts have been a reflection of social and intellectual concerns, the interest in history of the past, the attitude of a collective mentality, an of course, cultural policy in general and museum policy in particular, promoted by government bodies.