The State Museum and Exhibition Centre ROSPHOTO presents an exhibition from the collection of the Vitebsk Regional Museum of Local History, dedicated to one of the earliest Belarusian photographers — Sigismund Yurkovsky. Today, the museum preserves the largest collection of Yurkovsky’s works, а master who studied under the renowned St. Petersburg photographer Andrey Denier and was a friend of the great Russian artist Ilya Repin. Sigismund Yurkovsky was the inventor of the “instantaneous” (focal-plane) shutter, which became the prototype of modern cameras and is still used by photographers around the world.

The project is carried out within the framework of the nationwide (Russian) Scientific Conference “Photography. Image. Document,” held by ROSPHOTO since 2010 and dedicated to the expert study and technical analysis of historical documents and photography.