Studio Camera Görlitz

Manufacturer: Görlitzer Camera-Werke

Place and time of production: Germany, around 1920

Dimensions (cm): 48 . 60 . 150

Inventory number: Т:16.38

Thanks to the invention of photography in the 19th century, the tradition of portrait-making, once reserved only for royal families and aristocracy, became available to a wider range of people and it became quite popular. The photography ateliers used studio cameras for making portraits. 

From mid-19th century, the first photographs in Serbia were made by travelling photographers, while the first permanent photography atelier was opened by a Swiss man, Florian Gantenbein, in 1861 in Belgrade. In the following decades, permanent ateliers continued to appear not just in the capital, but also in larger towns in the interior of the country. The number of ateliers particularly grew after the First World War. One of them was the Atelier of Selimir Lončarević in Terazije 32, which was opened in 1928. Studio camera 18x24 cm Görlitz from that Atelier, was donated to the Museum by heiress Irena Lončarević in 1999.

Studio camera Görlitz is a high-quality professional camera made of cherry and beech wood. The camera’s body consists of two wooden frames connected with hinges. The front frame holds a plate with a slider for mounting the camera window, while the back frame has a place for focusing screen and cassette for sheet film or photographic plate. The wooden frames were connected by bellows in the form of a harmonica, made of book-binding paper reinforced with leather on folds.

Studio cameras were manufactured by very famous carpentry workshops in Germany and Austria, so the bodies of the cameras are considered to be some of the most precise products made of wood.