In her book, Une histoire contrariée: Le musée de photographie en France (1839–1945), the historian Éléonore Challine retraces the slow and difficult process to legitimise photography within the French institutional sphere. This is a history driven by individual personalities convinced of the need to preserve photography and give it a museum. Structured as an extensive and thorough investigation, scouring archives and unpublished written and visual traces of these projects, Challine’s study unfolds like a bourgeois drama in five acts. The Eye of Photography presents an extract—the second in a series of three—entitled “Back from Chicago.”
In 1893, Léon Vidal returned from the United States where he had attended the Congress of Photographers held on the occasion of the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. Vidal was a man in his sixties from a family of Marseille traders, and the owner of lucrative salt marshes in Martigues and Port-de-Bouc. Since his role in the founding of the Marseille Photographic Society in the late 1850s, his interest for photography had never wavered. A close friend of Alphonse Poitevin—an inventor in his spare time and a specialist in printing processes and photographic reproduction—Léon Vidal kept up with the evolution of photography from the very beginning. An indefatigable lecturer, he taught at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and Limoges from 1879. He was also a prolific author and, since the 1860s, had been writing exhibition reviews and contributed to journals, in particular the Moniteur de la Photographie of which he became editor-in-chief in 1879. By 1893, Léon Vidal had become a leading figure in the eyes of the French photographic community, known for his expertise, his talents as a popularizer, and his contribution to the recognition of photography.
Léon Vidal returned from Chicago with a project in mind. He had attended a talk by William Jerome Harrison “On the Desirability of an International Bureau established to Record and Exchange Photographic Negatives and Prints.”[1] The brilliant British scientist wanted to turn a local project, the Warwickshire Survey, into an international network of documentary archives. Léon Vidal, appointed as the French member of the international committee in charge of executing the project, was enthusiastic about the idea.
He was well aware the idea was not new. Spearheaded by Arago as early as 1839, and later in the 1850s, photography emerged as a legitimate means of documentation. Nevertheless, in the mid-nineteenth century, it was referred less as a documentary tool than as a novel instrument in the service of History. By contrast, in the 1880s, during a second wave of history-oriented photographers, the photographic community was galvanized by the spread of a unifying notion—the term “documentary”—although the definition of the photographic document was never well established or stabilized. Between these two moments—the 1850s and the 1880s—a shift in meaning had taken place: photography was no longer considered as reproducing a document; rather, it produced it.[2] This shift is aptly encapsulated in a phrase coined by British amateur photographers: “The camera as historian.”[3]
[…]
The idea that it would be of great value to the future to create, right then and there, collections of photographic documents, to be preserved for centuries to come as securely and durably as possible, had occurred to a number of people. This idea took on various forms in terms of its realization, but, as far as we know, no attempt at implementing it, applicable to a whole range of subjects for which photography may supply a documentary copy, had ever been successful.[4]
Vidal thus did not claim to have originated the idea, but saw himself instead as an entrepreneur at heart, as a conductor of a national orchestra—far beyond the scope of local initiatives—and a French builder operating in the context of international obsession with photography. While it is true that several documentary projects date back to the 1880s, it wasn’t until the 1890s, in the wake of William Jerome Harrison’s talk, that most initiatives got under way. It is worth noting the impact of the Congresses of Photographers, created in 1889, which is still largely undervalued by historians of the medium.
In 1894, Léon Vidal launched his campaign for the creation of a Museum of Documentary Photography. In the United Kingdom, Sir Benjamin Stone’s National Photographic Record Association was founded in 1897. The idea was then picked up in Belgium in late 1898, when Léon Roland, doctor in natural sciences and an amateur photographer, presented a report to the Belgian Photography Association in Liege, making a case for the establishment of such an institution.[5] In 1905, the twenty-three thousand documents already assembled by the Museum of Documentary Photography in Belgium joined the collections of the International Institute of Photography founded by Ernest de Potter. In Germany, in 1898, a Photographic Museum of Saxon Ethnography was founded jointly by the Dresden Society for the Advancement of Amateur Photography and the League of Saxon Ethnography.[6] In 1901, Eugène Demole (1850–1928), a trained numismatist, spearheaded the creation of a Swiss Museum of Documentary Photography in Geneva.[7] There are other examples that call for a closer study, specifically in Sweden, Poland, Italy, Spain, in the United States, as well as in Australia. The Western world had become fascinated with photographic documentation.
First it must exist (1894–1895)
The process of setting up the Museum of Documentary Photography was extremely swift: merely a year had passed between the project examining commission (February 21, 1894) and the Museum’s board of directors (February 1895). The General Assembly formalized the foundation of the museum in December of 1894, while the first photography donations were recorded already in May of 1894. While the presidency of the association was entrusted to the director of the Conservatory of Arts and Crafts, Colonel Aimé Laussedat, the presidency of the board of directors (and hence the effective management of the museum) went to Léon Vidal.
This lightning-speed organization stemmed from Vidal’s ability to mobilize the driving forces of learned societies and photography associations which united a network of individuals with scientific, artistic, industrial, or institutional backgrounds. True to their mode of operation, these associations designated an examining commission charged with transforming the project into a viable institution. The nine appointed commission members included professional photographers (Gaston Braun) and/or members of the French Photography Association (Léon Vidal, Jules Fleury-Hermagis); representatives of learned societies, from geography to zoology, and corporations dedicated to the advancement of science (Jules Guerne, Joseph Vallot, Captain Paul Eugène Venet, Edmond Aron); as well as persons from the worlds of publishing (Lucien Layus) and iconography (Jules Maciet). Almost all, with the exception of Jules Maciet and Gaston Braun, came to make up the core of the board of directors. If Vidal managed to mobilize the French associational network so swiftly, it’s because the creation of the institution for documentary photography resonated with the shared concerns of the publishing world and the scientific, artistic, and photographic communities.
In May 1894, following only two months of research, the members of the project studying commission announced that they had found a home at the Cercle de la Librairie, or Book Trade Union, located at 117, Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris. Founded in May of 1847, the Cercle de la Librairie was an union representing publishers, booksellers, typographers, and printers, which functioned as the main channel for communication with the State in matters related to literary property. The Cercle de la Librairie was also the name of the syndicate’s headquarters: a townhouse built by Charles Garnier and inaugurated in 1879, recognizable by the dome crowning its façade, a symbol of industrial and literary prowess. The Cercle de la Librairie became an exhibition venue, a place of social interaction, and exchange.
The supervisory board of the Cercle de la Librairie did indeed grant the Museum of Documentary Photography the temporary and revocable right to store and classify its collections in the printers’ rotunda,[8] where the Chambre Syndicale des Imprimeurs Typographes held its sessions, on the second floor of the building, right above the reception rooms. The bookseller and publisher Lucien Layus undoubtedly played an instrumental role in the matter as the Secretary of the Cercle de la Librairie and member of the Museum of Documentary Photography’s examining commission.
Very little is known about the physical existence of the Museum. For lack of any pictorial record, we must rely on rare, and rather laconic, descriptions which evoke a “vast circular hall” featuring three windows and tall “cabinets housing the treasures of this new museum.”[9] Indeed, the association was ordering furniture and supplies for the preservation and cataloguing of the collection (files, boxes) starting in 1895: if the photographic documents were “methodically catalogued and filed, they would naturally occupy considerably less space than if they were spread over a flat surface.”[10] Classification prevailed over display and collection took precedence over exhibition.
It was at this, albeit temporary, location that the adventure began.
Éléonore Challine
Born in 1983, agrégée in history and a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, Éléonore Challine is a lecturer in history of photography at Université Paris 1—Panthéon-Sorbonne. Une histoire contrariée: Le muse de photographie en France (1839–1945) is her first book.
Éléonore Challine, Une histoire contrariée. Le musée de photographie en France (1839–1945)
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[1] See Michael Hallett and Peter James, “Harrison, William Jerome,” in John Hannavy (ed.), Encyclopedia of Nineteenth Century Photography (New York/Oxon: Routledge, 2013), p. 636.
[2] Léon Vidal, “Projet d’organisation en France d’un service d’archives photographiques documentaires,” in Association Française pour l’Avancement des Sciences, Conférences de Paris, 1894, 23rd Session of February 24, 1894 (Paris: Sécretariat de l’Association, 1894), pp. 22–23.
[3] In addition to the Warwickshire Survey mentioned earlier, we should highlight the collection launched in 1885 in Germany by Dr. Meydenbauer at the Institute of Photogrammetry.
[4] Elizabeth Edwards, Peter James, and Martin Barnes, A Record of England: Sir Benjamin Stone and the National Photographic Record Association 1897–1910 (Stockport: Dewi Lewis/V&A Publications, 2006).
[5] See “Chronique,” Moniteur de la photographie, no. 4 (February 15, 1899), p. 49. On Léon Roland, see S. F. Joseph, T. Schwilden, and M.-Ch. Claes (eds.), A Directory of Photographers in Belgium (1839–1905) (Antwerp: Museum voor Fotografie, 1997), vol. 2, p. 335.
[6] Ulrich Pohlmann, “Die vergessenen Fotomuseen: Zur Geschichte realisierter und unausgeführter Vorhaben in Deutschland,” Fotogeschichte, vol. 10, no. 35 (1990), pp. 14–20.
[7] See Estelle Sohier and Ursula Baume Cousam, “Musée, histoire et photographie, le cas de Genève: Sur les traces du Musée suisse de photographies documentaires (1901–1909),” in S. Corsini, A. Lacoste, and O. Lugon (eds.), La Mémoire des images: Autour de la Collection iconographique vaudoise (Gollion: Infolio, 2015), pp. 169–193.
[8] Cercle de la librairie, “Séance du 20 avril 1894 sous la présidence de M. Henri Belin,” Minutes of the Proceedings of the Supervisory Boards, March 25, 1892 to February 22, 1901, IMEC, Fonds du Cercle de la librairie, call no. BCL 6.1, n.p.
[9] “Photographies documentées,” La Presse (May 16, 1895), p. 3.
[10] “Projet d’un musée des photographies documentaires,” L’Éclair (January 19, 1896), n.p.
