Cenette
The Cenette[1] is a camera for twelve square-format photographs (probably 6x6 on 120 film, but perhaps 4x4 on 127), made (or at least advertised) by the Central Camera Company Private Ltd of Mumbai, some time in the 1960s.[2] The camera has two apertures (f/7.7 and f/11), and three shutter speeds. It has a reverse-galilean viewfinder. The shutter release is on the shutter itself; it seems likely this is an everset shutter. In the advertisement illustration it appears to have a PC socket.
This is the only camera attributed to Central Camera Co., which seems to have been primarily a retailer. Central Camera was established in 1932[3] by Ambalal Jhaveribhai Patel, who also owned Patel India Ltd, which imported and rebranded the Camex Six of about 1950; he also published a photography and cine periodical, Camera in the Tropics, from 1940.[4] Ambalal Patel was a respected photographer, made an FRPS in 1939, and was also president of the Photographic Society of India. Patel died in 1961, before the Cenette was made.
It is possible that the Cenette is a model of some foreign maker, rebadged, or assembled, or manufactured under licence, by Central Camera. It has been noted that the camera in the advertisement looks rather like an Adox Golf with the front door closed, and a rigid lens-tube attached instead of a bellows.[5] It is also possible that the Cenette was the company's first step into manufacturing an original camera; or that it was never actually made: no examples of the camera have yet been seen.
Notes
- ↑ Courting the Amateur Photographer: The Contested Worlds of Advertising in Mid-century India, Sabeena Gadihoke (2021). In: Media and the Constitution of the Political: South Asia and Beyond, Ravi Vasudevan (ed.), pp.128-156 (page numbers of the original book; the PDF is just one chapter; reference to the camera, including a 1960s full-page press advertisement, is on pp.144 and 146 (the camera is named in the document as Genette, but in the advertisement it is clearly Cenette). Available under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
- ↑ Central Camera Company's address was 195 Dr Dadabhai Naoroji Road (formerly Hornby Road), in the Fort area of Mumbai. As of summer 2024, the premises are visible in Google streetview as a camera shop, with yellow Nikon banners, but it is closed, with traders' stalls in its porch, though other camera stores are operating in the building, and in the alley beside it.
- ↑ The Indian Year Book 1942, Vol.28, chapter Who's Who in India, archived at Internet Archive.
- ↑ Camera in the Tropics; part 4 of a series Photography and the magazine in India by Sukanya Baskar, at the Alkazi Foundation.
- ↑ Discussion Do you recognise this camera (India) in the Camera-wiki group at Flickr.
