The Russian Museum of Photography has remained to this day the only state museum of photography in the country. It was established at the initiative of the general public in 1992 and received the status of a state museum in 2000.
The museum is located in the building where photographers Andrey Osipovich Karelin and Maxim Petrovich Dmitriyev worked in the 19th century. The museum building is a historical and cultural monument of regional importance.
The exhibition presents photographs and photographic equipment of the 19th — 20th centuries: photo enlargers with gas burners; red safelights, operating on a candle or kerosene burner; Maxim Dmitriyev’s wooden camera with 45 by 55 cm glass negatives; a late 19th-century Kodak camera with 19-cm-wide roll film; photographs on metal, glass and porcelain surfaces; stereoscopic photographs of the 19th century and holograms of the 20th century.
A whole section is devoted to the development of cinematography and presents a magic kerosene lantern, the only working model of Kaiserpanorama in Russia, and 20th-century movie projectors.
