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Custody of photo graphy
DEC 07 - You Press the Button, We Do the Rest" was the popular slogan when the KODAK first introduced the cameras
that could be used by individuals in the first half of the 19th century (1887). But still the user had to submit the camera to the studio in order to download the film."The photography business was very complex and was restricted to professionals. Today, an ordinary person can do these jobs at the click of a button," says Madan Babu Bajracharya, a secret collector of antique and classic mechanical cameras.
"When I started the profession in the 60s, photography was still restricted to professionals and was beyond the reach of many," he says.
From the birth of cameras to this day, cameras have changed a lot and the industry has been rapidly moving forward into a new era of digital images, but in a little haphazard town of Thimi, the roots of photography can still be traced in its early cameras, which have become an envy to many foreigners.
Bajracharya, a resident of Madhyapur Thimi, Bhaktapur is a collector of antique and classic cameras. For the last 39 years, he has accumulated more than 50 antique and classic cameras. Not a small feat, by any account.
He claims that he possesses one of the oldest camera lenses—Delmeyer of 1880s, which is partially constructed of brass and weighs about 5 kg.
He purchased it from a person at Rs 2,000 in 1965. "This camera has now become an envy to foreigners," he says. "Some even offered me about hundred thousand rupees, but I did not sell it."
KODAK is another antique camera, which he posses now. It was presented to Nepal by the British government under the Colombo Plan.
He also has a Minox, a spy camera, which measures 8 mm and the ILFORD Sporti, which he said, was manufactured in West Germany in 1900 but has no record in Germany as the camera book suggests. Among other collections are crime cameras, old movie cameras, fingerprint cameras, robot and microscope cameras.
Some of them look like old manual typewriter and harmonicas. They have strange metal boxes with lenses and gears but they are still capable of capturing the images of the moments and places.
A photographer by profession, Bajracharya’s bedroom-cum-museum contains a wealth of information on the antique mechanical cameras.
He started collecting them as his hobby in 1965. He could have sold them and earned a fortune overnight if he had wished but he wants to make a name for himself by donating these precious items to a museum.
"I want to submit them to the National Museum so that the future generation will have a glimpse of some of the world’s oldest cameras," he says.
Unlike modern cameras, which have in-built auto flashes, some of his cameras have separate flash bulbs mounted on the top of the camera. They are not made of plastic as they appear today and operated electronically but are handcrafted of woods, brass and leather.
"He is the only person to collect antique cameras in Nepal," says Shreedhar Manandhar, one of the senior professional photographers of Nepal. He claims that the first person to click camera in Nepal were Bourne and Shepherd, British nationals, who ran photography in British East India Company in Calcutta in the 1860’s.
He said that the oldest photographs in Nepal were of Rana’s. They date back to 1860s and were taken by Europeans photographers.
We do not have antique cameras but we have some of Nepal’s oldest photographs, according to Rehana Banusyed, chief of the National Museum in Kathmandu.
According to Nepalese professional photographers, Dirga Man Chitrakar was the first official cameraman in Nepal. He was employed by the then Prime Minister Chandra Sumsher (1901-1929).
But to photographer Manandhar, the first professional Nepali photographer was Shamar Sumsher in around the First World War.
Bajracharya himself was one of the popular mechanics of camera when he began his career in photography in the Capital’s New Road in 1965. Ever since, his journey of camera collecting has given him a great deal of enjoyment but he never believed as it appears today that his cameras would be so precious, an envy to everyone.Posted on: 2003-12-08 04:14
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