France is serving up series of themed traveling exhibitions of photographs, historical and contemporary, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of photography. The program runs through next September.
The date is based on a technique even older than the Daguerrotype, commonly thought of as the first. Louis Daguerre, in 1839, was the first to become publicly known, but France is giving credit to Nicéphone Niépce, who in 1826 invented what he called ‘héliographie.’ Niépce used bitumen dissolved in lavender oil and coated onto a pewter plate to make his first image, which took hours of sunlight on his windowsill to produce an image of his shed.
The selected works, drawn mostly from the collections of France’s national collection of museums, the Réunion des musées nationaux, and the Médiathèque du patrimoine et de la photographie (MPP), which together own about 1.8 million digitized images. The shows are touring in a variety of cities and small towns in France, and some will make international appearances. The eleven different selections include pictures ranging from 19th-century studio portraits and dance to rural life and the front lines of war and the rhythms of daily life, as well as the individuals behind the lens.
Title Image: a portrait of Sarah Bernhardt, from Atelier Nadar
