100 ans d'histoire de la photographie dans les collections de la BnF. 1839 - 1939
Avignon TGV, Marseille-Saint-Charles, Paris-Gare-de-Lyon et Valence TGV, Paris
16 sep. 2026 - 19 nov. 2026

Photography’s First Century. Masterworks of the Bibliothèque nationale de France
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth (Texas, États-Unis)
4 oct. 2026 Until 17 jan. 2027

Designed for the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth (United States), the exhibition is presented in a scaled-down version in four major French train stations.

The exhibition celebrating the art of photography traces the history of the medium’s first century of exploration and discovery, from the rise of daguerreotypes and calotypes in the 1840s to the age of modernism between the World Wars. Drawn from the rich holdings of the Bibliothèque nationale de France—one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of photographs in the world—this survey of more than 170 images includes work by Henri Le Secq, Gustave Le Gray, Félix Tournachon (Nadar), Édouard Baldus, Louis-Émile Durandelle, Edgar Degas, Eugène Atget, Sonia Delaunay, André Kertesz, Rogi André, Man Ray, and Brassaï.

Photography’s First Century begins in the 1840s with photographs acquired by the Bibliothèque during the birth of the medium—a time when the library’s curators bought pictures chiefly as documents, for their information rather than their beauty. It ends in the 1930s when the same images had come to be seen as art. Following the history of the medium in France, the exhibition moves from the earliest, rival photographic inventions through the great campaigns to record the monuments of the nation and the wider world. From the commercial portrait studios of Second Empire Paris or a landscape artist by the sea, it turns to photography in the service of science, industry, and history, and then to the snapshot, the amateur, and the album. Finally, the exhibition reveals the international Paris of the 1920s and 1930s, where, through creative and technical innovation, a hundred-year-old medium was invented anew.

This exhibition is organized by the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Kimbell Art Museum in collaboration with Manifesto Expo and in conjunction with France’s celebration of the bicentennial of the invention of photography. Exhibition curators are Madame Sylvie Aubenas, director emerita of the Department of Prints and Photography, and Madame Flora Triebel, curator of the nineteenth-century photography collection, at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.