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Every once in a while, we do miss the times when each photo mattered on its way to a physical album. Something we could flick through every time we deep-cleaned our cupboard, instead of, now, mass-deleting 90% of a day's pictures.
Museo feeds into that memory of ours. If you happen to visit, there are two ways to approach the museum.
Route one: rock up by noon and properly wander through two whopping galleries, home to some 4,000 exhibits dating back to the 1980s. Then push on to a likely art exhibition upstairs on the first floor. Pit-stop at the in-house cafe for a breather, and finally wrap up your day at the museum shop.
Route two (also the one we took): sign up for a hands-on analogue photography workshop. The real showstopper of this weekend session is a working day inside an honest-to-goodness dark room.
Either way, you'll see why this museum of cameras and photography, founded in 2009 by Aditya Arya, is glorious. Like plenty of other museums in the world, this one also started as someone’s personal collection. Only today, it's the largest not-for-profit photography museum in Southeast Asia.
Visit the Museo Camera for history, for art, for a cool pair of camera earrings, or to feel analogue.
What's inside Museo's dark room?
A dark room is where the film from your camera gets turned into an actual photograph. And it's called a dark room for a reason: the lighting is seriously tight. Half the work happens in pitch blackness. We're talking so dark that even the teeny glow from your digital watch can wreck the whole photo reel.
The other half of the process is the bit you probably know from the movies, with moody red lights. That's after the films have been washed, wrung out and tucked into plastic frames. Now, all that's left is to print them onto a sheet of paper that's sensitive to every kind of light, bar red, as you see in popular portrayals.
The whole workshop is your crash course in analogue photography. You start with some basic theory, sliding into the practical where you click snaps with a real film camera. Then, finally, on day two, you get to develop your shots in the darkroom.
The galleries at Museo
The two galleries on the ground floor walk you through the history of photography. Beyond the labelled artefacts, find amazement in seeing the pinhole camera, the camera obscura, the camera lucida and the wet plate cameras, some dating back 180 years. Everything is vintage, but polished.
If you're a die-hard photography fan, go hunting for the Kodak Brownie, arguably the best gift of the 20th century, mostly to the West. It sold for a single dollar and made amateur photography affordable for pretty much everyone.
More to the museum
On any given day, Museo is also hosting, in parallel, an art exhibition, talk, screening, or something bizarre like a salsa workshop. So, naturally, the three art halls on the first floor keep a seriously busy roster.
There are also reference libraries, a reading room, a studio and a resource room for those who are deep, deep into photography. But this place serves equally well as a launchpad, even if you are a beginner and fancy taking it further.
Time Out tip: You can always take your personal film camera and reel and get it developed yourself while doing the workshop.