Museo Camera

India's first non-profit photography venture located in Gurugram, Museo Camera Centre for Photographic Arts is a fascinating, impressive, and informative place that showcases contemporary and vintage cameras along with the history of photography around the world.

About the Museum

Located in the urban city Gurugram of contemporary dwellings and architecture, Museo Camera, Centre for Photographic Arts is India's first crowd-funded undertaking and South Asia's largest non-profit photography museum which attracts numerous visitors who are not in search of food and drinks only but want to delve into the history through different lenses. Sprawled in an area of 18,000 square feet, the museum was created by Aditya Arya, the advertising man, and a visual historian, through a public-private alliance with the Municipal Corporation of Gurugram.

The Camera Museum offers free and paid libraries, lectures, photography exhibitions, unusual objects made from camera parts, kaleidoscopes, impromptu photography sessions, and lessons in modern history. It is an impressive place with over 2,500 cameras on display along with other photographic instruments dating back to the 1850s and the history of photography exhibited on walls with text. The written account makes it clear that the countries and genders were not differentiated in photography. Out of the many highlights of the museum, one of the major highlights is the compilation of 20,000 original silver prints chronicling India's freedom movement captured by freelancer Kulwant Roy, out of which 227 pictures are now a national collection.

The Museum has been decorated with chandeliers made from old cameras and film roll-shaped tickets and fascinating displays that offer insight to the visitors about an old-fashioned studio portrait setting to the working of a pinhole camera. The galleries exhibit photograph's transitions from silver grains to storage devices, film rolls to memory cards, and formats computed in millimeters to images illustrated in megapixels. Other things on display are studio, field, and portable cameras with detailed information about the manufacturing companies such as Kodak, Zeiss, Leica, Thornton Picard, etc. The Museo Camera is a representation that showcases that a museum is best curated and run by people who are passionate about them.