As times change, a museum devoted to photography has a mission to record shifts in a way that is unyielding to nostalgia and dissects photographic acts, facts and gestures. We all take photos: it is a practice we think we know and understand. And because this originally improbable image, this supposedly mundance and obvious act, is right in front of us, we do not see it. In this domain, nothing is given away and everything is hidden. The history of photography as applied to the museum—a legacy of incomplete, groundless, technical discourse—does not involve spectators. It delivers schizophrenic statements and addresses the device enthusiast or the aesthete without establishing links. Photography and art are deliberately confused. To give an account of Nicéphore Niépce’s invention and its many consequences, one must reposition spectators before the photographic object, enabling them to judge for themselves the aspect, material and content of photographic images. And as this sequence of disparate objects (device, image, printed spread, studio collection, lenticular network, etc.) does not speak—they take a malicious pleasure in keeping their secret— we owe the visitors explanations that they are entitled to expect.

François Cheval, exhibition curator, director of the museum Nicéphore-Niépce, France.