Gomel. Museum of Printing and Photography.

In 2009, the state institution "Gomel History Museum" began to collect photographs, cameras and photo accessories. The gradually formed collection (about 500 items) formed the basis of the Museum of Photography - the FIRST Museum of Photography in Belarus in the structure of a state institution, which was opened in Gomel on the eve of City Day in September 2015.

The first to donate a large number of items to the museum was Gomel photographer and collector Leonid Borisovich Pinsky. His initiative was supported not only by photographers and collectors from Gomel, but also from different parts of Belarus, Russia and other countries, for example, Alexey Nikitin (Russia, Kaluga).

It is symbolic that the museum is located on the first floor of one of the buildings on Kommunarov Street, in the premises of the most famous photo studio in Gomel, which operated here for more than 50 years, practically from the moment the building was constructed (since the 1960s).

The permanent exhibition of the museum presents key models of photographic equipment (Soviet Fotokor, Zenit, FED, Smena-8, Lyubitel, Kyiv, the famous German Leica, spy Hit, Praktica, Argus, pavilion cameras, etc.), photographic materials, equipment, a large number of thematic books, periodicals on photography, accessories, as well as photographs and photo albums, personal belongings of famous photographers donated to the museum by city residents and its guests. The exhibition also presents a photo lab of the Soviet period. By the way, the geography of photographs, as well as photographic equipment, is very wide: Minsk, Gomel, Mogilev, Riga, Vilnius, Barnaul, Leningrad, Krasnoyarsk, Kaliningrad, Ivanovo, Odessa, Kyiv, Dnepropetrovsk, Uzhgorod, Chernigov, etc.

Thus, in the Gomel museum one can study the history of photography development throughout the 20th century, both from the point of view of technical evolution and as one of the art forms. The presented collections reflect domestic and world trends.

As a result of the expansion of exhibition space, in 2017, in honor of the 500th anniversary of Belarusian book printing and the 100th anniversary of the Gomelskaya Pravda newspaper, the updated Museum of Photography and Printing was opened. A permanent exhibition, The History of the Gomel Printing Industry, was opened for visitors, where materials on the history of print media and printing houses in the Gomel region over the past 100 years are collected. Among the exhibits are printing devices, archival photographs, old black-and-white newspaper pages and bright posters. During the excursion, tourists are offered to get acquainted not only with the history of printing and photography, but also to walk through the past of modern Gomel media.