Established in 1854 and state-approved in 1892, the Sociéte Française de Photographie (SFP) is the oldest learned photographer society still active. The SFP conserves one of the most important private collections of historical photographs in Europe. This collection is now classified an historic monument. Bringing together images, books, periodicals and handwritten documents, the collection was formed according to its member’s activities: technical, theoretical and visual experimentations. In fact, although these early photographers often patented their innovations, they more regularly made their discoveries official by publically presenting them at the SFP, followed by the publication of an article in the society’s Bulletin and donations of prints and objects. Hence the SFP conserves the first photolithography by Alphonse Poitevin, the experimentations of colour photography by Louis Ducos du Hauron and his early research into anaglyphs, and the Lumière brothers’ first autochrome tests. To the technical ‘first times’ (developing a process or a camera) are added the ‘first time’ uses (applications), among which figure numerous attempts at snapshot photography, the first images of the Earth seen from above—aerostatic photography—by Paul Nadar, along with the successful attempts at the transmission of images from a distance by the Bélinographe, not forgetting Léon Gaumont’s attempts to measure the speed of cars. The actual idea of conserving photographic innovations of every kind for the future has been central to the SFP’s missions since its inception. Hence today, there are many practices and uses of the image that have followed on from the multiple tentative steps of which the SFP’s collection conserves the memory and hesitations. But first times were sometimes failures as well, and several examples, now illegible, have not resisted the vagaries of their era or of time.Apart from the socio-historical interest of these images, today these incunabulas of photography also invite us to an aesthetic reading of ‘photographic experimentation’. Offered in all kinds of mediums, manipulated and bearing the traces of these manipulations, annotated on both front and back, and reproduced in several forms, these images have nourished and continue to nourish photographic imaginations of which they form a precious archaeology.

Luce Lebart, curator of the exhibition, in charge of the SFP collections.