The Musée Nicéphore Niépce presents the exhibition “Inoxydable” (Stainless Steel).
A child of the 19th century and a contemporary of the Industrial Revolution, photography has accompanied the mechanization of the world.
From Nicéphore Niépce’s first empirical experiments between 1816 and 1833 to the sensors integrated into increasingly sophisticated and automated smartphones, photography has constantly accompanied technological developments.
From the very beginnings of the medium, industry, still in its infancy, has been a photographic motif in its own right. What better way than photography to capture and share progress and technological advances? The enlightened amateur captured for posterity the buildings that made his fortune, proof of his success. Thus, in the mid-19th century, Joseph-Fortuné Petiot-Groffier from Chalon immortalized his factory with his view camera and collodion plates before making his own salted paper prints.
The sensational arrival of Georges Eastman at the end of the 19th century finally took photography out of the realm of craftsmanship. The successive inventions of the ready-to-use camera and flexible film marked a turning point: reduction of the cost of materials and size of cameras, which were now mass-produced with photosensitive media, etc. All these revolutions established the photographic medium at the heart of societies’ visual culture and image-making practices. The photographic medium itself is an industrial object, which was naturally put at the service of other types of industries.
Industrial photography quickly became standardized, and motifs emerged: architectural views [the interior and exterior of buildings], machines, workers, and produced objects. Fascinated by industry and the industrialization of society, and themselves stakeholders in this industrialization through the proliferation of camera manufacturers, photographers of the interwar period naturally followed the movement: René Zuber, Régis Lebrun, André Steiner, Pierre Boucher, Jean Moral, the Soviet Constructivists, etc. Advances in printing and layout encouraged the proliferation of press titles [VU, Art et Médecine] and communication media [posters, brochures, etc.] for which photographers were called upon to illustrate, document, and sell. This pendulum movement contributed to a proliferation of photographs, and printed documents, culminating in François Kollar’s La France travaille between 1931 and 1935. For their part, Éditions Paul-Martial began working with manufacturers to develop their communication media, bringing together different trades [photographers, graphic designers, printers].
The Trente Glorieuses (Glorious Thirties) completed the transformation of photography into the main vehicle of industrialization and constituted its golden age. Everything had to be rebuilt, with public authorities providing support; it was a matter of doing and spreading the word.
Some photographers specialized, such as André Papillon, who stopped working as a photojournalist to create a studio dedicated to industry and advertising. Others, such as Jean-Pierre Sudre, financed their personal work with this newfound wealth.
The motifs remain the same, and from architecture to machinery, from workers to objects, industry still seems to fascinate photographers, who sometimes allowed themselves a certain license to put their own stamp on it, as the standardization of commissions imposed a standardization of photos.
Today, as globalization and free trade have destabilized the industrial world and production lines have been outsourced, commissions are becoming scarce.
While advertising photography is still popular, and architectural photography is still rarely commissioned by industrialists, the profusion of the interwar period and the Trente Glorieuses are behind us. Photographers such as Mitch Epstein, Stéphane Couturier, Claire Chevrier, Stephen Dock, Valérie Couteron, Bertrand Meunier, François Deladerrière, and Sylvie Bonnot are taking on deindustrialization on their own initiative, questioning the end of a world, reinterpreting the codes of industrial photography in order to better question them. In doing so, they use the photographic medium to question the workman’s gesture or the future of now-obsolete industrial architecture.
Curated by: Anne-Céline Callens, Sylvain Besson, Musée Nicéphore Niépce
Inoxydable
Until September 21, 2025
Musée Nicéphore Niépce
28 quai des Messageries
71100 Chalon-sur-Saône
03 85 48 41 98
www.museeniepce.com
www.open-museeniepce.com
www.archivesniepce.com
