A new museum was opened in Cesky Krumlov

The Seidel Studio Museum was opened in Cesky Krumlov this June. The museum is interested in photography and life in the 19th century.

It provides an opportunity to take a look around the house where photographer Josef Seidel and later his son, František, lived and worked. Among other things they both documented life in the now abandoned border region of the Šumava. In the house dating from 1905, the family home and photographic studio until 1949, almost 140,000 glass plates and celluloid negatives have survived and form a kind of chronicle of the Šumava region and everyday life along the border in the early 20th century.

Josef Seidel (a German by birth) was born into a family of glass engravers on October 2, 1859 in the village of Hasel in the Děčín District. Having learnt his trade as a photographer's assistant in Transylvania, Hungary, Bohemia and Austria, he worked for two years in Vienna for a company that made photographic plates. In 1888 he became the head of a photo studio in Český Krumlov belonging to one Gotthard Zimmer (1847-1886), which was run by his wife Karolina when he died. Two years later Seidel took over the studio in the garden of No. 64 Linecká Street.