When entering the Photography Museum you will definitely wonder: - Am I in a bar? In a coffee shop? Or in a museum?

The cameras in the museum-bar

This is because the Photography Museum is located inside Palacio Bar. The tables stand in the way of the display cabinets that are filled with cameras and accessories from different times. And you can enjoy a coffee while observing the cameras that seem to surround you from every corner.

Alejandro Simik decided to inaugurate the first showcase in this museum in the year 2002, due to the fact that the city of Buenos Aires does not have a big museum specialized in cameras, photographs and the history of Argentine photographers.

Other cameras exhibited

The museum currently exhibits 600 cameras, from antique ones made of wood with bellows and a bronze objective from 1885; to big and heavy studio cameras; going through portable cameras or those of street photographers. In addition, the museum also exhibits stereoscopic cameras for three-dimensional photography, miniature cameras for espionage, Polaroids, direct-sight cameras, reflex and even a binocular that takes pictures.

Although no daguerreotype camera survived in Argentina, some of the first photographs luckily did. The museum exhibits several Argentine and US daguerreotypes; as well as ambrotypes and ferrotypes of miscellaneous origins, including European.

A wide variety of photographs is exhibited: on glass, stereoscopic images, the first collodion processes, etc. The museum also has a stereoscopic standing viewer from the end of the 1890s, which can load up to 200 glass or paper sights.

Only a part of the material that Simik has accumulated over the years is exhibited in the museum-bar. Simik has more than 1,200 photographic cameras and accessories, 20,000 glass stereoscopic photographs, and around 10,000 paper photos in different formats, as well as a library with countless consultation books.