Industry Beneath the Eye of Pictures — Blind Journal

The Nicéphore Niépce Museum in Chalon-sur-Saône, in east-central France, invitations us on an instructive journey into the guts of the progress and challenges of business images. Curators Anne-Céline Callens and Sylvain Besson invite us to a visible (re)studying of the technological advances of the medium over two centuries of upheaval, beginning with the onset of the Industrial Revolution.

From movie to digital, to the appearance of social media and more and more subtle smartphones, images has regularly stored tempo with technological advances. More than 250 pictures, magazines, books, brochures, and digital prints from calotypes retrace the important thing position of the picture throughout 800 m² of museum house, capturing the thrill of a society present process profound transformation.

Mechanization of the world

From 1850 to 2024, the exhibition explores the period of industrialization in all its varieties: from its start to its peak, by means of its metamorphosis and its agony, by means of the destruction of business jobs and the decline of producing exercise.

“It’s a real topical issue,” explains Sylvain Besson. “Photographers are wondering about the issue of industrial closures. The Trente Glorieuses are over. Many no longer have work, and those who want to have a point of view today have difficulty getting into the places. For the past fifteen years, they’ve faced a drastic drop in orders, and everything is accelerating with AI. This exhibition is also important because Chalon-sur-Saône was an industrial city. Kodak and Philips have closed their doors. Saint-Gobain and Areva are still there, but they’re no longer thriving. We’re experiencing deindustrialization head-on.”

From the opening, the curatorial duo reintroduces the experiments of the inventor of images Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833), the early work of photographer Joseph-Fortuné Petiot-Groffier (1788-1855), who captured his darkroom inside his personal manufacturing unit within the nineteenth century, and the improvements of George Eastman (1854-1932), founding father of Kodak, who took the medium out of the newbie world by mass-producing the primary moveable digital camera.

Photographic emblems

Company and manufacturing unit homeowners, architects, designers, photographers… All shortly grew to become fascinated by this precision engineering and machine design. The exhibition thus unfolds over two massive rooms. The first is devoted to the “old” period (from 1850 to 1980) and is split into 4 elements with views of inside/exterior structure, the machine, the item, and the employee. The second explores the up to date period on the flip of the twenty first century and the photographers’ strategy to trade.

Among the emblems, François Kollar’s report, “France at work”, grew to become the standard-bearer within the early Nineteen Thirties. An exquisite discovery. His work reveals greater than 2,000 pictures, capturing all sectors of trade and agriculture over almost 4 years of analysis throughout France. “Today, it is the most important report in France, carried out by a single person,” insists Sylvain Besson.

Photographers comparable to Jean Moral, Roger Schall, Gaston Paris, Pierre Boucher and Marcel Arthaud are additionally vital for being the primary to seize the launch of the Normandie, a real behemoth of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique. The curators skillfully query the place of the picture in a society that, hammered by two world wars, is within the strategy of rebuilding itself. “The Thirty Glorious Years made photography the relay of industrialization and constituted its golden age,” remembers the curator.

Jean-Pierre Sudre is one in all its main figures. His {photograph} of the Compagnie Française de Raffinage in Gonfreville-l’Orcher, Le Havre, taken within the Sixties, graces the exhibition poster. “This choice is an aesthetic criterion,” he explains. “He is unrivaled in industrial photography today. He was the only one to play with high and low angles. He goes beyond the frontal view and the close-up. We feel that he is always looking for abstract forms that he produces in his personal work.”

Plural imaginative and prescient

Paul-Martial Editions additionally bears witness to the modernity of business promoting images by means of new business methods. The first posters and firm brochures thus joined this dance of metal with the advances in printing and structure. Press titles like Réalités (1946-1978) are consultant of this observatory of the world, collaborating with the best photographers of the time. “All the humanists worked for this magazine,” he affirms enthusiastically.

The museum house then continues its exploration with the arrival of pharmacies, which had been about to exchange apothecaries. “The sector was incredibly profitable from the start, which everyone financed through advertorials. At that time, around ten magazines were published by the laboratories. They employed artists like André Kertész, who photographed farmers in Berry, Man Ray, and Germaine Krull. All the advertisements were industrial views of their factories. Photographers were able to make a living from these commissions in the 1930s.”

Only Bernd and Hilla Becher, legends of the photographic industrial heritage, are absent from the partitions. “They are present in the form of books in the windows. This was a deliberate choice. The idea is not to show what everyone expects,” provides Sylvain Besson.

The finish of an period

The tour regularly provides strategy to deindustrialization, presenting the work of a number of up to date photographers, comparable to François Deladerrière in Ugine, Savoie, the place he captures the interweaving of Ugitech factories into the panorama. “He documents the architecture of industrial buildings, the production line, and the worker’s gesture. Nothing here suggests that French industry is slowly declining. His work is compared with the double-page spreads devoted to this subject in the magazine Réalités in 1949. We realize that the two reports are not so far apart. They all remain fascinated by architecture and gigantism, playing with this molten metal.”

In the midst of this twilight, Valérie Couteron additionally transforms the view. “Her personal work is magnificent. Here, she takes the workers off the assembly line and talks with them for a quarter of an hour, granted by the company, before photographing them. Since it’s not a commission, her portraits become terribly human, often conceived against a bare background, in an American shot. She immortalizes them at the moment when deindustrialization begins, when all these people are nothing more than figures for layoffs and unemployment on the news channels. She forces us to look at them, to feel empathy.”

From one other angle, the American Power collection by Mitch Epstein explores notions of energy by means of fossil, nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, and photo voltaic power manufacturing websites within the United States. With Metallic Lives, Bertrand Meunier chooses to take us to South Korea, displaying frontally portraits of staff and artisans.

For his half, Stephen Dock performs with abstraction in two of his collection situated in two cities in Chalon-sur-Saône. “This sculpture that he aestheticizes in front of a factory in Lewarde is of absolute beauty,” says Sylvain Besson. “As we progress through his triptych, it disappears. It’s the end of history; there is no more industry in France. Even the monument with its effigy disappears.”

The pictures of Sylvie Bonnot and Claire Chevrier full these a number of approaches. Each provides a distinct imaginative and prescient, whereas retaining the recurring motifs that illustrate the grandeur and decline of the economic period by means of photographs.

The exhibition « Inoxydable » is on view from by means of September 21, 2025 on the musée Nicéphore Niépce à Chalon-sur-Saône, France.