In April 2977, the Séeberger brothers’ studio doors permanently closed after almost seventy years of business (1909-1977). Four decades later, what has become of the photography archives of Jules, Louis, Henri, and Albert?
The Séeberger brothers are one of the photographer dynasties to come out of the 20th century that the golden age of photography saw blossom.
Initially, they were three brothers: Jules (1872-1932), Louis (1874-1946), and Henri (1876-1956). All expressed a shared precocious urge to create, noticed for the first time through the outlet of industrial drawing. At the dawn of a new century, Jules carried off his brothers to a new adventure, photography, which was a passion in which he had been dabbling for several years. The studio, set up in the family apartment, received its first orders from postcard editors, then from fashion magazines asking them to do stories in high society communities.
A few years later, Louis’s sons, Jean (1910-1976) and Albert (1914-1999), joined the business, renowned and prosperous, in order to do an apprenticeship there. They took leading roles there at the turn of the Second World War, and, because of financial necessities as well as a curiosity about photography, they diversified the work there. In addition to fashion photography that remained their specialty, they made (later assisted by Jean’s son, Daniel) a variety of stories for the press, portraits of prominent figures, shots of Parisian performances, industry catalogues, hunting photos, advertisements, immortalized the liberation of 1944, and created a photo library illustrating Parisian life, between picturesque and modernity.
Following the studio’s closing, with the absence of a buyer, the brothers left their life’s work to several competent French institutions. It was a work of legacy and memory pursued by Albert after Jean’s death and, today, pursued by Albert’s children.
You will find Séeberger photographs at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (fashion), the Médiatheque de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine (first generation postcard photographs), the ECPAD (military shots), the Bibliothèque-musée de l’Opéra (portraits of dancers, singers, and performances), the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris, Chateau de Gien’s International Museum of Hunting (hunting photographs), the Carnavalet Museum (photos from the Liberation of Paris by Jean), the Centre Pompidou, the Musée Français de la Photographie, the Palais Galliera, and even Les Arts Décoratifs.
In 1993, the Centre des Monuments Nationaux acquired a first fund of around 15,000 negatives made by the second generation of Séebergers (shots of France, photographs of monumental Paris and its popular small trades, portraits, images of performances and stories about life during the Second World War), as well as a few hundred prints and precious objects as a beautiful album portraying the time period, gathering the photographs dedicated to hotels in the Marais and the Île Saint-Louis, which were exhibited at the Petit Palais during the exhibition of documentary photographs from 1906.
This broad set was just recently completed by an immensely generous donation from the heirs of Albert Séeberger. In total, there are more than 10,000 new objects and phototypes (all types of negatives, prints, autochromes, color positives, drawings, archive documents…) from the two generations combined that enriched the department of documentary resources’ funds. We warmly thank them for everything.
This acquisition (including images of the Paris floods, floral designs, and formatting tests) helped an exhaustive panorama of the Séeberger brothers’ activity be created for the first time, from their commissioned work to their personal artistic work, from the amateurism of the early years to the flourishing business of the thirty successful years after the Second World War, from their discovery of photography to its abandon.
Maureen Huault
Maureen Huault is a photography historian and archivist of the photography center at the Centre des Monuments Nationaux.
The Séeberger brothers’ photographs conserved at the Centre des Monuments Nationaux are today the subject of a digitalization movement. They are accessible through the Regards database on line: www.regards.monuments-nationaux.fr.
