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 Structured as an extensive and thorough investigation, scouring archives and unpublished written and visual traces of these projects, Challine’s study unfolds like a bourgeois drama in five acts.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 first in a series of three—entitled “Photographers set out to conquer the museum.”
Between 1850 and 1860, just as the expression “photographic museum” was becoming commonplace, several emergent proposals were submitted to the authorities: their authors advocated the creation of a museum of photography. This time, they meant an institution, a museum as a physical structure. On February 23, 1852, a certain Lorentz suggested to the director-general of the national museums, the Comte de Nieuwerkerke, that he create a museum dedicated to photography. In February 1854, it was in turn Ernest Léopold Mayer who called for a “historical museum of photography.” The following year, in February 1855, Louis Cyrus Macaire contacted the Ministry of State with the view of creating a photography section. Finally, on December 2, 1859, Éléonor Bisson submitted a project to the Emperor for a museum of artistic property, in which photography played a major role. Three of these proposals were drafted by professional photographers or people close to them, the fourth by a painter. What were they after exactly, and how should we understand this institutional drive?
Joseph Lorentz, a painter and illustrator belonging to the circles of Georges Sand and Théophile Gautier, presented his project to the Imperial museums administration as early as February 1852. While the letter addressed to Nieuwerkerke seems on the whole rather disjointed, it does describe, albeit in a cursory manner, the ultimate objective:
“In the blink of an eye, we will be everywhere in the known world; from the naturalistic, architectural, archeological … points of view. In one word (since I could hold you in suspense much longer), I am talking about creating a … photographic museum.”[1]
Lorentz’s photographic museum would thus consist of a collection of photographs of landscapes, monuments, and sites around the world, represented by all disciplines and submitted by the photographers themselves. Having defined himself at the beginning of his missive, “in neologically contemporary jargon, [as] a utilitarian,” that is a person interested in what is useful as opposed to the ideal or pleasure, Lorentz appealed to the public good and insisted on the pedagogical utility of this museum which he was eager to curate. The effectiveness of “education by the eye,” as opposed to “education through comprehension,” seemed to him quite clear, especially in the case of artists. According to Lorentz, then, the benefit of a photography museum resided in learning through images. Unlike the writings of many nineteenth-century artists and art critics, the painter’s project was not concerned with the reproduction of works of art by means of photography. Rather than sketch the outlines of a museum of photographic copies, the project of a “photographic museum” aimed beyond a narrowly conceived photographic community. In that sense, despite its brevity and vagueness, Lorentz’s letter signaled the beginning of a dialog between artists, photographers, and the world of politics that would be carried on throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Two years later, in February 1854, it was Ernest Léopold Mayer who sent a letter to the Comte de Nieuwerkerke, along with a report entitled “The national campaign for the creation of a Historical Museum of Photography.” On this occasion, the project was much more detailed. The Mayer Brothers’ studio, “H.M. the Emperor’s Photographers” since 1853, enjoyed a solid reputation, but also found itself at a crossroads: the two brothers, Ernest Léopold and Frédéric, had separated, while the association with Pierre-Louis Pierson had not yet taken effect.
“The photographic museum I am trying to create today, unlike the two cited above, will be a historical, authentic, and infallible monument that will reveal to the posterity, and to all those who will come to avail themselves of its resources whether for the sake of art or science, the true nature of our century, not as it could be written, but as it exists and [is] indisputable.”[2]
In the opening lines of his report, Ernest Léopold Mayer explained the ambitions of this museum of photography: a collection of photographic images would make it possible to write History; it would be the very image of History; and it would establish historical truth. When the photographer speaks about the museum as a “historical, authentic, and infallible document,” it is hard to tell whether he had in mind the construction of a remarkable building or—and I am inclined towards this second interpretation—a monument in the Latin sense of monumentum, “that which serves as a reminder, that which perpetuates memory.”
The fact remains that the photographic museum was seen as a reserve of history, a place where one could access authentic historical events and figures in a completely transparent manner thanks to photographic images. According to Mayer, this “true nature,” which photography alone was capable of conveying, made a museum of photography superior to other historical repositories, such as “the two cited above” in the text, namely the Louvre and the Imperial Library. Whereas historical facts, transmitted through paintings and objects, books and written archives, seem to contradict one another and suffer from a lack of precision, photographs provide incontrovertible evidence. This belief was the premise behind the foundation of the museum of photography.
The belief was not new: in fact, it reprised Arago’s famous speeches given from 1839 onward, and in particular his report on the daguerreotype. “Everyone will imagine the extraordinary advantages which could have been derived from so exact and rapid a means of reproduction during the exhibition to Egypt,”[3] wrote Arago, commenting on the role of the historical catalyst of photography. In this widely studied, groundbreaking speech,[4] Arago enumerated the scientific, artistic, and topographic uses of the new medium as so many ways of validating and legitimating photography. The speech would become the source of all projects for a photography institution in the nineteenth century.
By the 1840s–1850s, the belief in the photographic image as an accurate representation of reality had indeed become widespread, bringing together artistic, political, and scientific communities. Trade photographers had turned it into their motto and a perfect justification of the museum projects they presented to the authorities: they proposed putting the photographic image in the service of the Nation and/or the Empire. They had their sights set on a historical museum of photography, as the title of the campaign clearly indicates, rather than a museum of the history of photography. Photography was to work in the service of History, not the other way around.
More concretely, the photographic museum envisioned by Mayer would house three types of images: first, collections of views of French and foreign monuments; second, a gallery of portraits of contemporary figures, including the political, economic, and cultural elites; and, finally, reproductions of works of art, as in a museum of copies, as well as science-oriented images in the fields of medicine and ethnography and snapshots of “public festivals and commemorations.” This description corresponds point by point to Ernest Léopold Mayer’s photographic production. The museum was conceived in the image of the studio, and the studio in the image of the museum. After all, didn’t an article in Illustration see Mayer & Pierson’s studio as “a sort of ethnographic museum of distinguished personalities?”[5] The two models—the museum, on the one hand, and the photographic studio on the other—converged in an interesting way. Far from being a simple “repository”—and Mayer’s proposal is, in any case, rather vague about the construction of photography collections—the museum was above all intended as a photographic studio of the State, responsible for keeping the official photographic record. Does this come as a surprise? Not at all. As an astute businessman, Ernest Mayer devised a museum model based on the one he had already mastered, which is why the budget estimate he presented to Nieuwerkerke took into account the costs of operation, salaries, the purchase of equipment, as well as the creation of the photography collection itself.
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] Archives des Musées nationaux, K19, February 23, 1852, Letter from Lorentz to Nieuwerkerke.
[2] Archives des musées nationaux, Z18, February 27, 1854, Souscription nationale pour la création d’un “Musée historique de photographie” [National campaign for the creation of a “Historical Museum of Photography”].
[3] Rapport de M. Arago sur le daguerreotype [The Report by Mr. Arago on the Daguerreotype], Presented to the Chamber of Deputies, July 3, 1839, and to the Academy of Sciences, Session of August 19, 1839 (Paris: Bachelier, 1839), p. 26.
[4] See, in particular, François Brunet, La Naissance de l’idée de photographie (Paris: PUF, 2000).
[5] Eugène Bobin, “Revue des établissements photographiques,” L’Illustration (October 9, 1858), pp. 137–8.
