Victor Hugo’s masterpiece and the early years of photography (1826–1910) are brought together in a single book, an artistic project long envisioned by the poet, at last realized.
Victor Hugo, “the French man of the century,” composed Les Contemplations while in exile. Published in 1856, this masterpiece reveals the writer’s spiritual and intellectual journey: “It is a soul telling its own story.” Marked by the mourning of his daughter Léopoldine, who drowned at the age of 19, the poet embraces in this collection the themes dearest to him: the exaltation of nature and love, reflections on freedom and social justice, and meditations on the human and the divine, between the soul’s affliction and hope.
Victor Hugo and Photography
Victor Hugo quickly grasped the importance of photography and marveled at the images he called “painted by the sun.” Although he did not practice it himself, he had a studio installed in the greenhouse of Marine Terrace, the house he occupied on Jersey between 1852 and 1856. In this prolific “Jersey studio,” his son Charles Hugo and his friend Auguste Vacquerie produced a corpus of about 350 photographs, capturing moments of exile, portraits of the family’s circle, and the many French exiles who had taken refuge on the island. Some photographed landscapes inspired his ink drawings. The poet also staged himself before his son’s lens, posing facing the sea or on the Rock of the Exiles.
The presence of prints in the collections of the Maison Victor Hugo attests to the poet’s interest in the medium: he befriended several photographers, including Nadar, and kept a large number of prints, among them a seascape by Gustave Le Gray reproduced in this edition. Julia Margaret Cameron, for her part, sent him a portfolio of around thirty of her works, which he kept in the trunk housing his own manuscripts.
Victor Hugo proposed to his publisher, Hetzel, to accompany his political works Napoléon le Petit and Châtiments with photographs, and to publish an album about Jersey and the Channel Islands bringing together photographs and poems. For political and financial reasons, none of these projects came to fruition, but they testify to the poet’s enthusiasm for photography and his wish to combine this new visual language with writing in a renewed poetic quest. Copies of Les Contemplations with photographs slipped between the pages are also known: the collections of the Maison Victor Hugo notably preserve the copy that belonged to Ms Hugo, embellished with 34 photographs. The pairings, carried out very likely under Victor Hugo’s eye, echo the poems more or less directly: certain choices function as suggestions, enriching the spectrum of literary interpretations through images.
This book from Éditions Diane de Selliers follows the same poetic dynamic, accomplishing the project Victor Hugo dreamed of realizing.
In her introduction, « Comme un album », Florence Naugrette likens the collection to a photo album: she reveals that the poems of Les Contemplations are, each in its way, black‑and‑white still images. The landscapes, scenes, and characters evoke mental pictures like photographs. Victor Hugo constantly invokes black and white: snow, the night sky, the dove, marble, the abyss. Blur and sharpness appear in mists and whirls of foam, in radiant noonday light or in the hard path whitened by winter.
The very structure of the collection resembles that of an album, tracing the poet’s itinerary: each poem is captioned with a date and a place known to be fictitious chosen by Victor Hugo as so many moments in an intimate journey. Leafing through this album of memories, the reader follows in Victor Hugo’s footsteps on a journey through the poet’s life his memories, loves, filial piety, bereavements, struggles, thoughts, doubts, despair, faith, metaphysical quest, and hope.
This edition is the result of three years of research, during which we surveyed private and public collections in Europe and the United States and assembled a corpus of several thousand photographs. The volume brings together works from, among others, the Musée d’Orsay, the Société Française de Photographie, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and private collections. One hundred and twenty works by eighty‑five photographers each presented in a biographical notice are reproduced in this book, which constitutes an unparalleled survey of the early history of photography.
Les Contemplations de Victor Hugo illustrées par les débuts de la photographie
Éditions Diane de Selliers
92 selected poems from Les Contemplations by Victor Hugo.
Introductions by Florence Naugrette and Hélène Orain Pascali.
120 photographs made between 1826 and 1910.
Notes on the poems and biographical notices of the 85 photographers.
Glossary of photographic techniques.
ISBN 9782364371491
https://editionsdianedeselliers.com/
