Personal Cameras of the Divine family.

Mateshwari had sensed the importance of preserving Shri Nathji's photographs, and never missed an opportunity to have as many pictures taken as were possible. Mateshwari had a handy German-made Agfa camera with folding bellows, which only she could operate. People who peered into it could seldom find the image they were seeking. Only Mateshwari knew how to focus it on Shri Nathji, and then to produce the all-important click. Over the years, it became more and more an artifact preserved by her, as she seldom had occasion to use it. This was because most of the portraits were made by professional photographers, and Mateshwari, herself, had to stand by the side of Shri Nathji in the photographs. A photograph of Pran Nath and Priya Nath on the tricycle in the lawn of Shadi Bhavan taken on May 15, 1946, was one of the photographs taken by Mateshwari with her Agfa Camera.

Agfa-Gevaert N.V. (Agfa) is now a Belgian multinational corporation, Headquartered in Mortsel, Belgium, that develops, manufactures, and distributes analogue and digital imaging products and systems, as well as IT solutions. So it has diversified into various businesses. In the past, Agfa film and cameras were prominent consumer products.

1867 The company Aktiengesellschaft für Anilinfabrikation ( That’s full form of Agfa I guess) was founded in Rummelsburg (now in the Lichtenberg borough of Berlin) as a manufacturer of dyes and stains. It became a public limited company in 1873. The founders were Paul Mendelssohn and Carl Alexander von Martius. In 1894 it founded another company L. Gevaert & Cie in Antwerp, Belgium, arising from the workshop for the manufacture of photographic paper belonging to Lieven Gevaert. The Agfa trade mark appeared in 1897.

1940 Agfacolor negative-positive color material is used for the first time for a feature film "Frauen sind doch bessere Diplomaten" (Women are the better diplomats) by the German UFA production company. After second world war Agfa reappeared as an individual business. An Agfa plant located in what was to become East Germany. In 1952 saw re-establishment of Agfa AG as a wholly owned subsidiary of Bayer in Leverkusen. From then on the company made its headquarters in Belgium and continued to diversify into many businesses.

Small Agfa camera with folding bellows. Become had very popular with tourists and amateur photographers. People even now love to collect them.

In later years many of the photographs at home were taken from English-made Kodak box and Baby Brownie cameras, which the children, Pran Nath and Priya Nath, came to use as they grew up.

Brownie is the name of a long-running popular series of simple and inexpensive cameras made by Eastman Kodak. The Brownie popularized low-cost photography and introduced the concept of the snapshot. The first Brownie, introduced in February, 1900, was a very basic cardboard box camera with a simple meniscus lens that took 2¼-inch square pictures on 117 rollfilm. With its simple controls and initial price of $1, it was intended to be a camera that anyone could afford and use, hence the slogan, "You push the button, we do the rest." 

The camera was named after the popular cartoons created by Palmer Cox.

One of the most popular Brownie models was the Brownie 127, millions of which were sold between 1952 and 1967. The Brownie 127 was a simple bakelite camera for 127 film which featured a simple meniscus lens and a curved film plane to compensate for the deficiencies of the lens. Another simple camera was the Brownie Cresta which was sold between 1955 and 1958. It used 120 film and had a fixed focus lens.