The Nicéphore Niépce Museum in Chalon-sur-Saône, in east-central France, invites us on an instructive journey into the heart of the progress and challenges of industrial photography. Curators Anne-Céline Callens and Sylvain Besson invite us to a visual (re)reading of the technological advances of the medium over two centuries of upheaval, starting with the onset of the Industrial Revolution.
From film to digital, to the advent of social media and increasingly sophisticated smartphones, photography has continually kept pace with technological advances. More than 250 photographs, magazines, books, brochures, and digital prints from calotypes retrace the key role of the image across 800 m² of museum space, capturing the excitement of a society undergoing profound transformation.
Mechanization of the world
From 1850 to 2024, the exhibition explores the era of industrialization in all its forms: from its birth to its peak, through its metamorphosis and its agony, through the destruction of industrial jobs and the decline of manufacturing activity.
“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 photography Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833), the early work of photographer Joseph-Fortuné Petiot-Groffier (1788-1855), who captured his darkroom within his own factory in the 19th century, and the innovations of George Eastman (1854-1932), founder of Kodak, who took the medium out of the amateur world by mass-producing the first portable camera.
Photographic emblems
Company and factory owners, architects, designers, photographers… All quickly became fascinated by this precision engineering and machine design. The exhibition thus unfolds over two large rooms. The first is dedicated to the “old” era (from 1850 to 1980) and is divided into four parts with views of interior/exterior architecture, the machine, the object, and the worker. The second explores the contemporary era at the turn of the 21st century and the photographers’ approach to industry.
Among the emblems, François Kollar’s report, “France at work”, became the standard-bearer in the early 1930s. A wonderful discovery. His work reveals more than 2,000 photographs, capturing all sectors of industry and agriculture over nearly four years of research across France. “Today, it is the most important report in France, carried out by a single person,” insists Sylvain Besson.
Photographers such as Jean Moral, Roger Schall, Gaston Paris, Pierre Boucher and Marcel Arthaud are also important for being the first to capture the launch of the Normandie, a true behemoth of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique. The curators skillfully question the place of the image in a society that, hammered by two world wars, is in the process of rebuilding itself. “The Thirty Glorious Years made photography the relay of industrialization and constituted its golden age,” recalls the curator.
Jean-Pierre Sudre is one of its leading figures. His photograph of the Compagnie Française de Raffinage in Gonfreville-l’Orcher, Le Havre, taken in the 1960s, 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 vision
Paul-Martial Editions also bears witness to the modernity of industrial advertising photography through new commercial strategies. The first posters and company brochures thus joined this dance of steel with the advances in printing and layout. Press titles like Réalités (1946-1978) are representative of this observatory of the world, collaborating with the greatest photographers of the time. “All the humanists worked for this magazine,” he affirms enthusiastically.
The museum space then continues its exploration with the arrival of pharmacies, which were about to replace 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 walls. “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,” adds Sylvain Besson.
The end of an era
The tour gradually gives way to deindustrialization, presenting the work of several contemporary photographers, such as François Deladerrière in Ugine, Savoie, where he captures the interweaving of Ugitech factories into the landscape. “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 also 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 another angle, the American Power series by Mitch Epstein explores notions of power through fossil, nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, and solar energy production sites in the United States. With Metallic Lives, Bertrand Meunier chooses to take us to South Korea, displaying frontally portraits of workers and artisans.
For his part, Stephen Dock plays with abstraction in two of his series located in two towns 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 photographs of Sylvie Bonnot and Claire Chevrier complete these multiple approaches. Each offers a different vision, while retaining the recurring motifs that illustrate the grandeur and decline of the industrial era through images.
The exhibition « Inoxydable » is on view from through September 21, 2025 at the musée Nicéphore Niépce à Chalon-sur-Saône, France.
