The Egg Before the Hen, the Photograph Before History — Blind Journal

In 1923, in a Paris studio, a person in a darkish swimsuit stares intently at an egg balanced in an egg cup, as if ready for it to admit. This {photograph} opens “Premières fois / Premières photos” (“First Times / First Photographs”), the exhibition Luce Lebart has curated for the Pavillon Populaire in Montpellier (France), working via November 1, to mark the Bicentennial of pictures. Two hundred years of mislaid patents, tiny beginnings and founding gestures, instructed room by room by the girl who gathered them.

That egg belongs to a tool referred to as a mirœuf, a curious family equipment from 1923, unveiled the next 12 months on the Salon des appareils ménagers, which judges the freshness of a shell via a barely tilted mirror, on a precept near that of the digicam itself. A little bit additional alongside in the identical preamble sit sealed envelopes, deposited by inventors with the academies of science to guard their secrets and techniques. They are opened, Luce Lebart notes, solely within the occasion of a precedence dispute, as occurred with Louis Ducos du Hauron’s patent for the invention of shade. The relaxation stay sealed, silent guardians of an creative nineteenth century.

Playful, however by no means idle: the phrase “firsts” itself took time to settle. Luce Lebart had first imagined one thing extra technical, extra severe, earlier than realizing the chosen time period can be extra poetic, able to humor too. “This isn’t an exhibition just for specialists”, she remembers. “Here, we’re popular. For me, it’s really important to be accessible to everyone. Otherwise, it doesn’t interest me.” The wall texts, intentionally brief, are written “for people in a hurry”.

The similar spirit runs via the neighboring hall, the place clusters of crystals catch the attention: the snowflakes of Wilson Bentley, an novice meteorologist from Vermont who, from adolescence, hooked up a digicam to his microscope and devoted his whole life to the pursuit. More than 4 thousand snowflakes photographed, every one totally different. “Every crystal is unique, they are all firsts”, sums up the exhibition’s curator, turning that plain truth into a technique for the entire present.

Oblivion as a part of invention

This playful stance doesn’t rule out political ones. The exhibition correct opens with a girl, and the selection is not any accident. “For me, it was obviously interesting, important, and political to open a photography exhibition not with pioneers, but with a pioneer,” Luce Lebart explains. Anna Atkins, an English botanist educated in pictures by her father, printed between 1843 and 1853 the primary e-book illustrated with pictures, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions. She signed her plates with the initials A. A., lengthy learn as these of an “Anonymous Amateur,” earlier than her title was restored to her.

This pioneer opens the best way to a gallery of much more nameless figures. Next comes the constellation of patents, 4,000 filed within the nineteenth century and held within the archives of the Institut nationwide de la propriété industrielle (National Institute of Industrial Property), 4,000 inventors of pictures of whom, most of the time, solely a reputation on a kind stays. The “point Nadar,” a mark accompanying his patent for aerial pictures, continues to be used as we speak in aerial survey work. The gadgets designed to carry our bodies nonetheless in studio settings clarify, in hindsight, the stiffness of interval portraits. One digicam stand doubles as a bicycle kickstand, a lot to the amusement of Montpellier’s metropolis corridor, in a metropolis the place folks cycle freely.

From the inventors’ anonymity to the emblems’ fame is commonly only one patent away. The trademark filings inform one other story, that of the shift from laboratory experiment to manufacturing facility product. “These trademarks really show photography’s shift from an experimental object to a factory product”, notes Luce Lebart. Kodak, a rootless phrase chosen by George Eastman for its pronounceability in each language, embodies by itself the beginning of branding.

Oblivion, nevertheless, also can strike the victors. Two Niépce daguerreotypes face one another throughout the identical wall, one preserved, the opposite engraved by Niépce’s personal hand in tribute to Daguerre: “My dear devoted friend Daguerre”. The View from the Window at Le Gras, taken in 1826 and held in Austin, Texas, was solely recognized as the primary {photograph} within the early Nineteen Fifties, when collectors rediscovered it. Before that, one other picture, now misplaced, held that position, together with in Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. “It’s a bit like the Loch Ness monster, cryptozoology,” Luce Lebart jokes. A battle memorial in Chalon nonetheless bears, due to this confusion, the mistaken date of 1822. The centenary was celebrated in 1924, the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary in 1989. In 2026, each dates are marked directly.

Against this belated glory, the opposite aspect of the story: Hippolyte Bayard, inventor of a rival course of, staged his personal Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man in 1840, having acquired neither the popularity nor the pension granted to Daguerre and Niépce’s inheritor. His pictures, by no means fastened, fade within the gentle earlier than reviving in darkness, as if the method replayed, every time, the oblivion its inventor suffered.

Seeing far, seeing quick

After oblivion, brilliance. Color fills a complete room: the experiments of Louis Ducos du Hauron, the Lumière brothers’ first Autochromes, and the 68,000 Autochromes of the Archives de la Planète (Archives of the Planet) gathered by Albert Kahn, amongst them the primary shade images of Algeria, together with a stereoscopic anaglyph picture of a Berber girl, lengthy wrongly credited to an American invention.

A full chapter is dedicated to long-distance transmission. During the Siege of Paris in 1871, René Dagron microfilmed messages to ship them by service pigeon between Paris and Bordeaux. Arthur Batut, for his half, wrote a treatise on kite pictures. Nadar backdated his patent for aerial pictures, truly taken in 1868, after an American had crushed him to it. Édouard Belin transmitted the primary panorama, the primary portrait by wire, and in 1931 Pope Pius XI himself posed earlier than the bélinographe to be transmitted by wi-fi, the Church having, because the Annunciation, all the time adopted questions of long-distance communication carefully.

The similar vertigo of capturing issues from afar runs via the room dedicated to clouds, which might be neither bottled nor stuffed. Perhaps that’s the reason meteorologists, unable to review the cloud itself, grew to become photographers of clouds, giving rise to the primary worldwide cloud atlas, whose present version nonetheless derives immediately from it. Luce Lebart is devoting her subsequent e-book to the topic, out within the coming days.

Luce Lebart has additionally unearthed, in Montpellier’s municipal archives, the town’s oldest images of skateboarding. Further on, Étienne-Jules Marey’s well-known cat, caught on the precise second it turns in midair, is a reminder that chronophotography fed medical analysis simply as a lot as sports activities pictures.

After the inventors and the technical feats, the ultimate stretch of the present modifications register: the photographers themselves get to talk. {A photograph} by Henri Cartier-Bresson, taken in 1922 together with his group of fellow scouts, is stored at his basis. In 1992, Agnès b. requested European photographers to write down out, by hand, the story of their first {photograph} for her exhibition “Première photo” (“First Photo”) on the Galerie du Jour. Willy Ronis instructed his there. “There are no two first photographs, every photograph is unique, they all tell us something”, Luce Lebart sums up, having chosen to let that voice converse for itself somewhat than rewrite it as a wall textual content.

Luce Lebart additionally exhibits the primary photographed Chinese atomic bomb take a look at, however searched in useless for an equal French picture. “I looked for the French one, I never found it,” she says, exhibiting as a substitute an oblique {photograph}: residents of the Sahara studying from the newspaper of the Gerboise Bleue take a look at, and Malian college students demonstrating 200 kilometers from the location of the blast. The absence, right here, says a fantastic deal.

From that lacking {photograph} to those splashed throughout a entrance web page is a brief step: the exhibition closes on the query of the entrance web page. In 1980, Libération marked the dying of Sartre, its co-founder, with its first-ever full-page {photograph}, a format the paper would later use for the obituaries of its personal photographers, Sebastião Salgado and Martine Franck amongst them.

Two hundred years of firsts, then, and a conviction that runs via the entire present: invention, in pictures as elsewhere, isn’t a solitary flash. It is fabricated from trials, unclaimed patents, pictures that vanish earlier than they’re acknowledged. “Try again. Fail again. Fail better”, Beckett as soon as wrote. Luce Lebart has made it a thread working via the entire exhibition, and Montpellier an open-air laboratory.

The exhibition “Premières fois / Premières photos” is on view on the Pavillon Populaire in Montpellier via November 1, 2026. Catalogue with texts by Luce Lebart, Jean-Paul Gandolfo and Amandine Gabriac, published by Spector Books, 2026.