In 1965, the birth of the first public photography collection in a French fine art museum took place in Arles at the Musée Réattu. Jean-Maurice Rouquette, curator, and Lucien Clergue, photographer, dared to launch an avant-garde project which would lead to the Rencontres d’Arles festival, the Ecole Nationale de Photographie (ENSP) and also to the widespread recognition of photography as an art form in France. The 2015 exhibition celebrates the progress made since then and takes us back to the beginnings of this unique collection’s remarkable history that now has 5000 prints. The ever-increasing expansion of this department has consumed the museum’s identity and calls for an appraisal through a selection of 200 photographs which express the state of a mutating art in an exhibition driven by a fundamental question: what does photography bring to art?
Pascale Picard, directrice du musée Réattu