New on View: Photographic Views of the Imperial Asylum at Vincennes

It would be difficult to overstate the increased quality and importance that Photographic Views of the Imperial Asylum at Vincennes (assembled 1861) brings to the Museum’s already-strong collection of French photographs from the 1850s to the 1870s. While the Museum has many strong portraits, architectural photographs, still lifes, and landscapes, both domestic and foreign, there was not yet a French album from this period. This particular album is exceptionally rare. No other American collection holds an intact album of prints of the Asylum—and it is now on view in the Museum's recently refreshed galleries of European art from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Trained in both drawing and painting, Charles Nègre is now widely understood to be one of the two most celebrated French photographers of the mid-nineteenth century. As early as 1855 and throughout the 1860s and 1870s, Nègre’s photographs were widely and frequently exhibited throughout Europe: Amsterdam, Brussels, London, and, of course, Paris, where he was a founding member of the Société Héliographique, the first photographic society in the world. Nègre’s photographs, like his paintings, received critical praise and regard. One source of praise was Emperor Napoleon III, who had seen the album of calotypes Le Midi de la France: Sites et Monuments Historiques Photographié (1854–55), the results of an expedition in the Midi region in 1852.

On March 8, 1855, Napoleon III announced in an imperial decree the creation of the Imperial Asylum, a convalescent hospital to be created just outside Paris in the Val-de-Marne. The Emperor’s goal was to provide those injured on construction sites or in factories—"the worker's true field of honor," in the words of one of his ministers—with care comparable to that given to French military veterans. Construction on the Asylum began in August of the same year, and the Asylum was officially opened in April 1857. At some point between 1857 and 1860, Nègre was commissioned to photograph and document the building of the Asylum, and the resulting album of photographs was assembled by August 6, 1861.

Perhaps more significant than any of this localized context, however, is the astounding fact that this album is far more than the sum of its parts. It is one of the earliest examples of photographic reportage with a social aim, and therefore functions as a highly important document of the medium’s deployment in the service of progressive changes to society. What Nègre’s commission embodies in mid-nineteenth-century France shapes a tradition that has repercussions throughout the remainder of that century, including Brady and Co.’s views of the horrors of the Civil War in the United States, John Thomson’s Street Life in London, and Jacob Riis’s landmark How the Other Half Lives. This tradition—whether termed social documentary, concerned photography, or photojournalism—has proven since the 1850s to be one of photography’s most impactful contributions to visual culture and society as a whole.