The Photographic Museum was created by Marie-Noëlle and Tristan Bréville in the late 1960s. Their daughter Marie Julie is now making it a family affair to keep the tradition rooted down in Mauritian culture.The Museum goes beyond the conservation and preservation mission as it creates and saves the memory of a nation.
The Museum is located in an 18th century building and the visitors will be able to meet the creators of the Museum. The creators vision is to promote Mauritian photography.
Photography Museum
The Museum contains more than one thousand cameras and the first photographic lens which equipped one of the first ever made photographic cameras and bought by a Mauritian in Paris in 1839. In addition it has a collection of nearing a million documents and a large collection of postcards and photographs.
There is also a fabulous collection of Mauritian “daguerreotypes”. The daguerreotype was the first commercially successful photographic process (1839-1860) in the history of photography. Named after the inventor, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, each daguerreotype is a unique image on a silvered copper plate.
The equipment displayed at the museum ranges from the press machine dating back from 1773 to the earlier Gaumont stereoscopic film used in cinema halls as from 1913.The gallery includes earlier colonial sceneries of sugar barons and plantations as well as remote village way of life to the development of cities like Rose Hill and Port Louis.
Photography Museum
The guided tour of the museum lasts around an hour but Mr Breville (the museum founder) stated that “there have been people who were so lost on the picturesque display that they spent the whole day there”.
