Masterpieces of the Musée d'Orsay Photographic Collection

This presentation inaugurating the permanent gallery of photography features a some of the most striking works in the collection. The selection ranges from the beginnings of the technique to the 1920's, and gives a large place to acquisitions of recent years. The exhibition starts with daguerreotypes, mostly French, many of which are incunabula of photography. It continues with rare prints of the 1840's and 1850's, works by English (Fox Talbot, the inventor of the process) but above all French pioneers of paper photography, with a direct positive by Hippolythe Bayard dated 1839. The 1850's, considered as the golden age of French photography, are particularly well represented in the museum collection with works by Nadar, Gustave Le Gray and Charles Nègre, whose emblematic picture Le Stryge was recently acquired in a public auction. The end of the century is represented by shots taken by artists, painters and engravers (Degas, Bonnard, Rivière) who practised this technique as amateurs. The exhibition ends with the modernist trend of the medium, with works by Atget, a 19th-century photographer considered a pioneer of photographic modernity at the beginning of the 20th century, with Anglo-Saxon pictorialists, Haviland, Steichen and Stieglitz.