Which artist is not, in some direct or roundabout way, his own ‘material’? When Montaigne wrote in the preface to his Essais, ‘it is myself I paint’; when Rembrandt, at every stage of his life, captured the passage of time on his face; when Doisneau photographs his reflection in the mirror, it is the artist’s singular presence that strikes us, irrespective of medium, and reveals a glimpse of a vision for us to share.Many photographers ponder what will become of their work. Following Eugène Atget in 1920, countless artists and their descendents have entrusted their collections to the State: Nadar, Lartigue, and more recently Willy Ronis, André Kertész, René-Jacques and many others. The French National Library conserves the collections of Emmanuel Sougez, Reutlinger, Rogi André, Annette Lena and Yvette Troispoux. With the Brancusi bequest in 1956, France’s National Museum of Modern Art began to embrace photography in its collections. During the 1990s, this museum took in the collections of Brassaï, Eli Lotar, Dora Maar and Man Ray. Photographic treasures apart, these collections are also rich in sundry documents: diaries, correspondence, invoices, proof of publication, working contact-sheets, original prints—items from beyond the frame, as it were, which together give photographs depth and a certain texture of time. This is what the exhibition ‘Photographers in Self-Portrait’ reveals to us. Reflecting the diversity of publicly conserved photographic collections and the riches they contain, it presents each portrait’s multiple realities, concealed behind the words ‘donation’ and ‘bequest’. These fragments of life, added to our collective heritage and handed down to future generations, help to root each self-witness in a shared history.

Frédéric Mitterrand, French Minister of Culture and Communication