It's hard to know where to start, but I guess I'll start by saying my expectations for a museum are probably pretty high. I'm married to a museum expert (on the board of multiple very prominent museums, has run several museums) and historian (noted author, speaker, etc). My take: this museum a) is extremely poorly done and b) isn't really a museum. I am also a longtime photographer and expert on historical cameras--I have restored them professionally for years, and have extensive hands-on experience with a very large chunk of photographic history, having, used, serviced, and repaired everything from 1800s to late-20th-century. I don't know everything and I haven't worked on everything, but certainly more than many people even within the field.
So let's start with the "museum." First of all it's not a museum. It's a collection, and although it's a big collection, it's not a great one. It's just rack after rack, shelf after shelf of cameras crammed together, with no real thought given to how to organize or present them other than putting similar cameras next to each other. A museum needs to provide well-researched, intelligently organized and presented, thoughtful, fact-checked, referenced, contextualized interpretation of the objects. And there is a reason that being a museum curator is a career in itself: it's not something just anyone can do. Knowing the model numbers and year of make of a bunch of cameras is not a qualification. This "museum" is just the result of a person's lifetime obsession with cameras. It has very little educational value. If you like to look at cameras, great, this might be for you. But you will not learn much. You may think you do, but bear with me.
Following on from that, the man who runs the museum, David Schwartz, is not a trustworthy source of information. The museum was formerly a camera store, and David was the owner and salesperson. Emphasis on salesperson. When you visit the museum, you'll be barraged with endless little trivia intended to impress and entertain you. And here's the key thing: a lot of it is utterly false, and unfortunately David is very egotistical and does not appreciate anyone participating in a conversation with him. He wants you to be an eager, mostly silent, audience raptly drinking in his dispensed wisdom. He does not want you to contribute knowledge of your own, let alone correct his many misunderstandings and outright falsehoods. Even a "yes, and" response from you is risky business. For example David was showing me a camera with some unique characteristics, as many of them have, and I, eager to contribute, said "yes, and it has a fizbidget widget," referencing something that doesn't merit detailing here. David stopped cold and gave me a disapproving look, then said something like "what are you talking about? it has a normal widget. Look. See? Normal." He was talking about something internal that can only be seen properly after disassembly, and here's the key, the camera is actually famous for what I was talking about. It's not like I was touching on something obscure. David absolutely should know that this camera has the widget I described, even though he's never disassembled and repaired one himself. But wow, the way he got his back up and got aggressive with me. I've known David since the 1990s and I have seen this kind of behavior from him many times. He gets belligerent and accusatory at the drop of a hat not only when you correct him, but when you contribute something to a conversation that he didn't first contribute himself. It all has to be about him, nobody else.
Speaking of correcting, he needs a lot of it. For someone who dealt and sold specific cameras, he sure does know a lot of stuff that just ain't so. If you let him, he'll fill your head with nonsense and you won't realize it. I'll leave it at that.
Finally, and actually the most importantly, the museum and David are both extremely problematic. Extremely. There is outright Nazi-worship on display in the museum in multiple ways. There's also completely ahistorical, revisionist garbage about the Confederacy and key Confederate figures. And I have on multiple occasions been subjected to David holding forth on his views of both of those topics, and wow, he's ignorant. He's absolutely confident that he knows things about both topics, and he's wrong, wrong, wrong and in very harmful ways. I know this again in part because of the circles I run in myself. Many of the things David will say are just trivially falsifiable if you take ten minutes to reference a primary source such as a contemporary newspaper article, or for that matter, the Confederate Constitution or any key speech or book of letters from the people he's talking about. And David worships these people on the wrong side of history so much that he's dedicated an outsized chunk of his personal time, and of the donations and revenue from the museum, to furthering those hateful groups. He'll proudly tell you so. Enough said. read more