A Unique Museum for Cameras

Many of us have a running love affair with cameras, old as well as new. A few of us (including yours truly) collect cameras.

- Ashok Kandimalla

Most of these collections – some of them are quite large – however, languish in the homes of collectors and hence are not accessible to the public. Add to that, our country has very few camera museums where camera lovers can feast their eyes. Bucking this trend is a camera museum called Dr. Arun’s Photography and Vintage Camera Museum, in Chennai, which hosts a great number of cameras – 1500 in all! This museum grew out of Dr. A.V. Arun’s personal collection.

Dr. Arun’s passion for collecting cameras started in 1997 when he came across two damaged Yashica TLR cameras in a flea market in Chennai. He bought both and dismantled one of them to understand the mechanism. Slowly this interest grew and he started to go through the history of cameras and found it to be interesting and fascinating. As time went by, he started picking up more and more cameras and slowly the collection started to grow. By 2000, his collection had about 300 vintage cameras.