On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, the Nicéphore Niépce Museum [1972] proposes to lift the veil on a dimension removed from the public eye: in the reserves, the wealth of its collections. To show everything is impossible, a representative selection is not either. A future catalogue will trace the history and procurement policies. So, to make both the diversity and the number, avoid repetitions with the permanent path, it is to an amusing and poetic approach of these spaces, in the manner of Georges Perec, that the public is invited.
Adept of rankings, lists, inventories, nicknamed the «crazy taxinomist», Perec [1936-1982] questions and ironically in his essay «Thinking/ Classifying», this anthropological mania of wanting to put order in the universe. The human being must classify the world to understand it, to think it. Everything in its place, a place for everything. This great “mania” is at the very heart of museum activities. Whatever its field of knowledge, a museum acquires, inventories, classes, preserves, transmits, exhibits.
For fifty years, the Nicéphore Niépce Museum has been carrying out these missions. But with one particularity: its subject, photography.
It’s a deep dive.
Because photography, the daughter of the nineteenth century and its revolutions, carries within it, from its appearance, a fixed idea, a utopia. Believe that we can, thanks to it, show everything, and bring the whole world to museums. To believe that we can make the universal and exact statement of things, to keep the image alive. To believe that we can overcome the passing of time, forgetfulness and destruction. To believe also that one can better know and understand the world, by detailing it, by dissecting it, by examining it in all its folds and folds, from the infinitely large to the infinitely small.
The photograph did not fail [?] and the reserves of the Nicéphore Niépce museum are proof of this. For two centuries, photography has undoubtedly served our taxonomic, individual and collective obsessions, whether scientific or documentary, amateur or artistic. The nature of the museum’s collections and their organization sometimes lead to a perecquien vertigo. The vocabulary listed by the writer is equally relevant to photography, “cataloguing, classifying, cutting, enumerating, grouping, hierarching, listing, numbering, sequencing, ordering, organizing, grouping, distributing”. Then “subdivide, distribute, discriminate, characterize, mark, define, distinguish, oppose, etc.” But contrary to what they induce, none of these operations can be objective. Neutrality and completeness do not exist. There is always the grid of a look, preliminary choices and an out-of-scope.
Fortunately, Perec reminds us with humour and humility that our quest for omniscience is doomed to failure. Our attempts to organize knowledge are often just over, and may be “barely more effective than the initial anarchy.”
Exhibition scheduled until September 25, 2022.