WHEN George Eastman invented the box camera, little did he realise the impact he would have on Bishop Auckland.

First of all, in 1885, Eastman invented a film which could be rolled up and used inside a special camera. Three years later, he invented the No 1 Kodak camera and, by 1900, the Box Brownie was selling for a dollar a time. The era of popular photography had begun.

Bishop Auckland was one of the first towns in the North-East to latch on to the art form.

Only Newcastle, South Shields and Durham City had photographic societies when the people of Bishop formed one in 1899.

Today, Bishop Auckland Photographic Society is the oldest in the region with a continuous history.

Tomorrow, an exhibition which is the final piece in its centenary celebrations will open at the Discovery Centre in the town.

A book written by club member Cliff Howe tells how, on September 29, 1899, a small advertisement appeared in the Auckland Times calling all townspeople interested in "the pursuit of photography" to come to a meeting at the Central Temperance Hall, in Newgate Street.

More than 20 business and professional people attended and they elected Ernest Lingford, a member of the baking powder family, as president. This was a solidly middle-class affair: the vice-presidents were schoolteacher William Dent, banker Thomas Spark and ironmonger Sydney Foster. Thomas Craig, who owned the Temperance Hall, which later became the Coffee Palace, shrewdly opted to be treasurer. JD Athey, owner of the Auckland Times, was the secretary and the auditor was a banker called William Dixon Dent.

"I have an image of a lunchbreak one Thursday market day around 1910 with perhaps a dozen men, smartly dressed, their bowlers on their heads and each one carrying a little package under his arm, striding out of Newgate Street and scurrying across the Market Place, dodging the carts, the stalls and the busy shoppers, heading towards the society's rooms at 11 Silver Street and hoping to have first turn on the new enlarger lantern," says Cliff Howe in his preface.

By this time, the annual subscription was 10s 6d, so few working men could have afforded to join - although those who lived in the countryside did get reduced subs in recognition of the difficulties faced by the rural community. That privilege was not removed until 1963.

It could even be said that the society was looking up the social scale rather than down it.

Before the outbreak of the First World War, the Bishop of Durham, his daughter Vera de Vere, Sir William Eden of Rushyford and Lady Chaytor of Croft Hall had all been invited to open the annual exhibition.

Of course, the members of the society were primarily interested in photography. The bishop allowed them special dispensation to photograph in his grounds, and they probably organised visits by horse charabancs to interesting places like Hamsterley - their bulky camera equipment went on in advance.

In fact, Dent, who was manager of the York City and County Bank in Newgate Street, was a photographic pioneer. He was one of the first to have a hand-held camera, as opposed to a tripod one, and in 1909 he visited Norway armed with a slide camera.

In the inter-war years there was an explosion in photographic interest. Soldiers had learnt how important pictures of family were to them when far away and, after years in the muddy trenches of the Somme, there was a yearning to capture England's green and pleasant land on film. This resulted in some extraordinarily beautiful pictures from Bishop Auckland photographers such as William Nicolson and Thomas Ambler.

When photography recovered after the Second World War, it found itself in the colour era. This gave societies like Bishop a headache: colour film required specialist equipment and professional developing - no longer could hobbyists pop over to the enlarger in their lunch hour.

The society responded by moving from addressing the techniques of developing films at its monthly meetings to discussing the techniques of how to take a better picture. Its members also began dabbling in the new technology of the cine camera.

New technology, though, is something the Bishop members have been keen to embrace. In the 1970s, a group of members who called themselves Orion North produced an audio-visual display, showing 750 slides on three screens to stereophonic musical accompaniment.

"On the screen, shots of rain and river fade into a view of Cow Green dam on the Tees, and the sound effects become dramatic," raved The Northern Echo.

"A burst of Sibelius and then across the 24ft screen spreads a panorama of the Tees around High Force. The scene is set for 70 minutes of rich photography..."

Bishop Auckland Photographic Society is still embracing new technology 100 years after its foundation. Its centenary history book comes on a CD-ROM which features hundreds of wonderful pictures taken by its members over the years.

* One Hundred Not Out: Bishop Auckland Photographic Society, by Cliff Howe, costs £5 on CD-ROM or £7.50 on both CD-ROM and paper. Full details at the exhibition or from Mr Howe on (01642) 874793.

* The exhibition at the Discovery Centre, in the Market Place, Bishop Auckland, will open from 11am to 4pm every Thursday, Friday and Saturday, from tomorrow until October 20