A Very Expensive Camera
What is thought to be the world's oldest commercially manufactured camera is to be sold at the private Westlicht gallery and auction house in Vienna on May 26. Dating back to 1839, the Daguerreotype, encased in a sliding wooden box frame, was made by Susse Freres of Paris. Westlicht said that the camera has never been restored.
The camera belongs to a US-based scholar and was inherited from his father, a technical photography professor at Munich University. The starting bid is $132,000, but the final price for the 168-year-old gadget is expected to go beyond the one million dollar mark.
Daguerrotype photography, which lasted only about a decade, produced a direct image onto a polished silver surface, which meant that no copies could be made, as there were no negatives.