PERMANENT DISPLAY

Due to the state of the current building at Mārstaļu Street 8 and the need for reconstruction, the Latvian Museum of Photography will move to temporary premises in the building of the Latvian Academy of Arts at Kronvalda Boulevard 4 in the spring of 2024. To successfully move the museum collection, the historical museum headquarters will be closed on December 30th, 2023.

The History of Photography in Latvia. 1839–1941 

The museum’s permanent exhibition introduces its visitors to the history if the development of photography in Latvia. It is installed in three halls and includes items from the Latvian Museum of Photography, the Museum of the History of Riga and Navigation, and private collections.

Visitors can see the oldest and rarest photographs available in Latvia – daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and ferrotypes, as well as stereoscopic images, photographic equipment and photographs taken between the end of the 19th century and the 1940s. Among the items – miniature camera “VEF Minox” produced by the factory “VEF” in Latvia in the late 1930s, which is now included in the Latvian cultural canon as the most notable brand of national design and manufacture. The visitors can also see a vast collection of Latvian photographers’ works, which includes author’s testimonies about some of the largest events in the first half of the 20th century in Latvia; and a selection of works by photographers of Latvian decent worldwide.

Visitors are free to take photographs in front of the historical hand-painted studio backdrops.