For The Eye of Photography, photographic books are as crucial as an exhibition or a portfolio. They make the history and the reality of the medium. Our correspondent Zoé Island de Beauchaine has a relentlessly curious and educated take a look at the current publications.
On the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Nicéphore Niépce Museum in Chalon-sur-Saône, Sylvain Besson, director of the museum since 2008, has actually published an initial history of photography, an event of the tremendous diversity of this “endless” medium, informed through the museum’s collections.
With “four million photographs, more than 8,000 cameras, at least two times as numerous devices, thirty thousand magazines and technical books or books showed with photography”, the collections of the Nicéphore Niépce Museum have a lot to tell. This incredible collection is identified above all by its heterogeneity, the outcome of a work of valorization of the medium as a whole, started by Paul Jay, the very first director of the museum, and continued by his follower François Cheval.
Over the years, the collections have been enriched with photographs made by professional and anonymous people, getaway souvenirs and household albums, legal or scientific pictures, postcards, advertising or photos of everyday things, relief pictures and microphotographs. The Niépce museum has likewise mainly contributed to the opening of the discipline to photography publications and books by being among the first to integrate them in its collections, whereas lots of people choose the individuality of an original print.
It is specifically this idea of originality, obtained from art history, that the museum has actually always declined to restrict itself to. In the eyes of Sylvain Besson, the opposite “would imply excluding the concept of series for an author-photographer, the album of photographs for the amateur, the illustrated magazine for journalism company, and neglecting the extremely essence of photography as envisaged by Nicéphore Niépce: that of the numerous.
Echoing Niépce, the book published by Textuel proposes to check out the history of photography through the numerous courses it has taken, from its production to digital, offering its share of (re)discoveries. In an encyclopedic kind, it traces its technical development in addition to that of its distribution media, its omnipresence in a boundless number of domains– style, marketing, press, documentary, propaganda, judiciary, science, eroticism, movie theater in addition to the whole intimate sphere– and lastly its apprehension as an art in its own right.
In this “other history” of photography, as particular as it is interesting, the confidential rubs shoulders with the great names of photography, the artist and the craftsman become one, method and aesthetics stroll hand in hand, the intimate becomes expert and vice versa.
Sylvain Besson’s book embodies fifty years of acquisitions whose heterogeneity makes for richness and pays homage to the Niépce museum, which has actually never ceased to promote the universality of this multi-faceted medium, responding to François Arago’s ambition for photography: “that everyone must get hold of it.
Sylvain
Besson– A history of photography through the collections of the Musée Nicéphore Niépce
Foreword by Michel Frizot
Published by Textuel
21 x 28, 360 pages
59 EUR
ISBN: 978-2-84597-928-4
Offered in book shops or online