In Simorre, a small village in the Gers, a studio‑gallery houses one of the most singular photography collections in France. Behind this project are Jacques Barbier and Élise Pic, a duo known as Le commun des mortels (Ordinary people). He is an artist; she a collector and photographer. Together they share the same passion: vernacular images “anonymous photographs”, discreet witnesses to everyday life.
The venture began in 2013. Since then, their collection has never stopped growing and has reached astonishing proportions: more than three million photographic objects. The holdings retrace nearly two centuries of the history of photography, from nineteenth‑century daguerreotypes to contemporary digital images. Each photograph, whether exceptional or ordinary, has found its place within the ensemble, for Jacques and Élise do not collect according to market value or rarity, but according to a logic of sensitivity, curiosity, and transmission.
In their Gers workshop the duo do more than preserve. Le commun des mortels develops an educational practice nourished by the collection. Through the publishing of artists’ books, the organization of educational workshops, and themed exhibitions, they give a second life to these forgotten images. The aim is clear: to bring archives and creation into dialogue and to pass on a critical and poetic way of looking at ordinary photography.
Among the many categories within their collection, one draws particular attention: the “damages.” Here the photographs are not perfect; they are creased, stained, torn, oxidized, burned, or nearly effaced. These images, damaged by time or use, paradoxically become works in their own right. Freed of any artistic intention, they reveal an involuntary aesthetic—a value born of imperfection. From this series the exhibition Dommage ( too bad)! came into being. Presented at the Centre de photographie of Lectoure as an immersion in the universe of the two collectors, it invites the public to enter their living archive and creative laboratory. Visitors discover an installation in which each altered image tells not only its own material fate but also the story of how we look at photography, memory, and time.
“Our work of collecting popular photographs and creating singular archives aims to give the everyday a ‘background noise’ the attention it deserves. What interests us? Questioning the ordinary and bringing it to light, accounting for the life of the common run of mortals,” they explain.
Their collection, both encyclopedic and deeply human, reminds us that behind every modest image lies a story that can transform the common into the universal.
Jean-Jacques Ader
Jacques Barbier
For more than forty years he has explored the visual arts as a collector, gallerist, and photographic artist. In 1983 he opened in Paris the first gallery devoted to the abstract painting of the 1950s, then for nearly twenty years directed a contemporary art gallery near the Centre Pompidou, present at FIAC. In 2013 he founded Le commun des mortels, a vast collection of vernacular photographs now bringing together several hundred thousand images, questioning collective memory and the beauty of the everyday. Highly active in the dissemination of photography, he takes part in numerous international events (LUSSAN1000PHOTOS, L’Été photographique de Lectoure, REVELA’T, Vintage Photo Festival). In 2021 he created in Toulouse the Atelier‑Galerie KLOUG, then in 2024, in Simorre, the atelier Le commun des mortels, dedicated to photography and anonymous images.
Élise Pic
A psychologist and trainer for eighteen years in social and judicial structures, she has developed a reflection on otherness, memory, and traces. In 2018 she left the clinical field to undertake an artistic practice centered on the collecting of images, silver‑gelatin printing, and publishing. Her meeting with Jacques Barbier in 2017 initiated joint research on vernacular photography and its poetic and political dimensions. Together they founded in Simorre the atelier Le commun des mortels, a place for sharing and valuing images of everyday life.
The exhibition “Dommage!” is held at the Centre for Art and Photography in Lectoure (32) from October 11, 2025 to January 25, 2026. Admission is free. Information: https://centre-photo-lectoure.fr/
