Today’s edition is dedicated to the Musée de la Photographie de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles in Charleroi.
Inaugurated in the spring of 1987, the Wallonia-Brussels Federation Museum of Photography in Charleroi has recently passed its thirties, the age of maturity.
With its 6,000 m2, half of which is open to the public, and a free access to the park, it is the only museum institution exclusively dedicated to photography in French-speaking Belgium, offering visitors no less than twelve temporary exhibitions of different sizes, as well as a permanent collection organized both chronologically and thematically, which is not the least of the peculiarities of an institution that is constantly trying to reinvent itself.
The thirty-three years of its existence have thus seen successive phases of development, both for the reception of the public and for the presentation of the collections: the place, first of all, of a neo-Gothic Carmel, little adapted to a museum organization, then, the success coming from 1993 to 1995, the first major works agreed by the authorities in order to bring the building up to basic museum and safety standards. Finally, after successive improvements linked both to the collections and to the reception of visitors, the construction and inauguration of a new wing in 2008, which doubled the surface by opening the Museum to its park which has become public, endowing it with new spaces for the contemporary collection, an enlarged library, a cafeteria and an auditorium, in addition to new storerooms.
With a team of thirty-five people, the Museum, formed as a non-profit association – the equivalent of the 1901 law for association in France – has the missions of conservation, study and diffusion of photography, from a rich collection of 85,000 prints and three million negatives. Publications, an Open Photography magazine published three times a year, as well as a newsletter regularly attest to its activities.
Xavier Canonne – Director
Musée de la Photographie de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles
Avenue Paul Pastur 11, 6032 Charleroi, Belgium
