Did you know that the first “camera” was actually just a dark room with a tiny hole in the wall? That was the camera obscura. Light would pass through the hole and project an upside-down image of the outside world onto the opposite wall. And that’s where the story of photography begins.
As far back as the 5th century BCE, Chinese philosopher Mo Ti described how light could create an image inside a darkened room. Later, Aristotle and Arab scientist Ibn al-Haytham helped explain why it worked. In the Middle Ages, European thinkers rediscovered the idea, and during the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci used the camera obscura to help artists draw realistic perspective.
But the real breakthrough came in the 1820s, when Joseph Nicéphore Niépce succeeded in capturing an image using light-sensitive asphalt varnish. It was the first true photograph. A few years later, William Henry Fox Talbot improved the process by inventing negatives, which allowed people to make copies of photos.
The earliest cameras were huge and heavy. Daguerre’s camera, for example, weighed around 50 kilograms! But inventors quickly moved forward. Cameras with folding bellows appeared, then metal-bodied models with bright lenses — like the one made by Voigtländer in 1841.
In 1865, Thomas Sutton created the first reflex camera. It already looked a lot like the cameras we know today and could produce surprisingly sharp images for its time.
By the early 20th century, cameras became smaller and more practical. In 1925, Leica introduced the first camera that used 35mm film — small negatives, but big, beautiful prints. Then in 1929 came the Rolleiflex — a stylish twin-lens camera that was produced for more than 60 years and became a favorite of professionals.
There were also simpler box-shaped cameras — called box cameras — that made photography accessible to everyone. The most famous of them was the Kodak Brownie. You didn’t need to know anything about settings. Just press the button! Kodak handled the rest. As the company famously said: “You press the button, we do the rest.”
🖼️ In this exhibition, you’ll find:
- a real camera obscura — the grandmother of all cameras,
- large, early cameras from the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
- the famous Kodak Brownie box cameras,
- and elegant Rolleiflex models held by photographers all over the world.
📸 This section tells the story of how people learned to capture light, freeze a moment in time, and hold onto it forever. The history of photography is the history of how we look at the world.
