Exploring a Vintage Photography Studio in Cesky Krumlov

To cap off their week-long study of photography, CIEE Prague Global Navigators visited a late-18^th-century photo studio, the Museum Fotoatelier Seidel. For generations, the studio served its community by documenting the lives of their citizens. If you were a Czech in the early 1900’s, you could expect to take a photograph only once or twice in your lifetime, so the experience was a special one. The waiting room of the studio was lavishly decorated to set the tone for the occasion:

Our Global Navigators were able to recreate that experience for themselves by posing with period costumes and backdrops:

Although most industries declined during Europe’s early 20^th century military struggles, the demand for photography actually increased as families took pictures of their loved ones before they went off to war. When the government took over the Seidel studio during the Soviet era, the meticulously catalogued glass plate negatives of this piece of Czech history were lost for a period; it has only been within recent years, with the restoration of the studio, that these artifacts have been made available to the descendants of their subjects.

Although students have been working with digital photography this week, they were able to get a taste of the physical origins of the form by using the equipment and techniques that the Seidel family employed in their studio.

Students made photograms, or silhouettes of objects using photographic paper:

The experience gave students some new insight into both the mechanics and the history of photography.