| (On the decision to collect photography today) Foreword For one hundred and fifty years, from 1839 to 1989, human beings produced images on paper, on glass, on metal, on porcelain, on cloth — on anything that could hold a trace of light.
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ForewordFor one hundred and fifty years, from 1839 to 1989, human beings produced images on paper, on glass, on metal, on porcelain, on cloth, on anything that could hold a trace of light. I will not call these images “analog.” I prefer to say physical photography, or material photography: images born in the sensible world, objects you can hold in your hand. From the very birth of the invention, the aesthetic research of the practitioners, and then the critics, and then the public, established a pantheon of iconic images. A paradox: these images are today almost inaccessible in their original physical form; one sees them only in the great exhibitions of the world, while they are reproduced and multiplied to excess, sometimes in deceptive forms. The same image thus lives two opposite tempos at once: one or a few originals, kept under guard, and a thousand successive reproductions, down to its ephemeral copy on billions of screens. And yet that aesthetic research has irrigated and shaped every photographic practice, down to the most modest snapshot. The masterpiece does not stand above the mass of images: it is the sap that runs through it. 1839–1989: this long century and a half has left an immense deposit. It is a patrimony comparable to that of printed books, built up over five hundred years, and it offers a solid foundation for human memory. In the same way, physical photography allows each of us to build a robust personal iconotheca. Faced with an ocean of images, one soon asks: how to find one’s bearings? How to tell, without a long discourse, what deserves a gesture of preservation from what may simply follow its natural course? I would like to propose not a hierarchy, but a distinction based on durations. Three families of objects, defined not so much by their value — patrimonial, scientific, aesthetic, or commercial — but by the relationship we hold with the time of their consumption. Three Gestures, No MoralityThree families, then, and three simple verbs. The first family is consumed in an instant; the second is tried and practiced; the third is kept and handed down. It is not a matter of saying that one is worth more than another. A beach needs its pebbles as much as its amber. Without the modest ground of ephemeral things, no iconotheca could exist at all. Sorting is not a judgment of dignity: it is an ecology of preservation. One does not keep a pebble the way one keeps a pearl, not because the one is worth less, but because the pebble is eternal as a kind and interchangeable as an individual, while the pearl can cross generations only as itself. The First Family: The Ephemeral, the AbundantThink of water from the fountain, of blackberries gathered along the hedge, of fruit picked by the roadside, of the countless images on the internet, of social media. Things free, or nearly free, taken without counting, consumed at once. Think of pebbles, of seashells on the beach, of paper tissues, of disposable masks. Think of sketches, of scribbles, of postcards, of newspapers, of TikTok reels. In photography, it is the broadest and most modest family: photo postcards, old portraits, anonymous family photographs offered today in the markets for the price of a coffee. They are what the Italians call i ramini, gli spiccioli, the loose coins in your pocket. These images ask for no particular care. Millions of them exist; they lie in drawers, in cellars, on the stalls of flea markets, inert, dusty, but within reach. They have little appeal, and yet they are the very ground on which all the rest stands. The Second Family: Choosen ThingsHere we find the book bought in the shop, the daily meal: the fish from the market, the bottle of wine shared at the table. We find the shirt one wears and wears out. We find the decorative print, the poster, the picture hung above the sofa. The photographic print on quality paper that we ourselves decide to produce, or to reprint. It is the family of chosen things. One pays the price of a concert, of an evening at the cinema, of dinner with friends. In Europe, today, let us say twenty euros, somewhere between ten and thirty; though one finds the equivalent in every country in the world. In photography, it is the price of an old albumen print, of a curious snapshot, of an anonymous daguerreotype, of an old photograph one gives to oneself or to a friend, of a silver gelatin print, of a fine print on handmade paper. A small, deliberate pleasure; a gift one allows oneself. It is here that we must practice, must try, must single out a photograph and ask whether it is a good candidate for a gift, or for longer keeping; it is here that we may educate ourselves through the pleasure of the search, through the gesture of the flea market, through low-cost error, cultivating intuition and material analysis. The Third Family: The Long TempoFinally, there are the objects that escape consumption. The bottle of a great vintage, the exceptional fish one carries to a great cook for a rare feast: food that is awaited. There is the dress for great occasions, the one a person even thinks of handing down to the children. There is the exceptional work on paper, the museum piece. There is amber; there are precious stones; there is the magnificent shell passed from one generation to the next. In photography, it is the family of the pioneers’ processes, of the photographs shown in the exhibitions and the art biennials of the past, of images endowed with a powerful force of evocation, of those that stop the passerby’s gaze without his knowing why. We recognize these images intuitively, with no prejudice as to famous or unknown sitters, one country or another, one subject or another. Amber is not a better pebble. It is an object whose own duration calls for a different gesture from us.
The Three WavesSince photography has existed, there have been three waves of collecting. The first: the operators themselves, the photographers of the time when photography was contemporary. It is the gesture of the gift, to offer a set of prints to the king, to the emperor, to the hospital, to the geographical society. It is the first great deposit in the institutions, begun in 1839. The second wave, in the 1970s, with the birth of a specific art market, first in London, then in France and the United States, with New York and Montreal collections at the center of the game. And today, the third wave: yours. Our grandparents rediscovered the taste for collecting photography fifty years ago, and it became a fever just as the digital technologies allowed everyone to become a skilled photographer, just as it became nearly free to multiply images. But our grandparents had the tradition of identifying the masterpiece, the Master, the Chef-d’Œuvre. Among them, the arbiter elegantiae was Pierre Apraxine, who formed the Gilman Collection in New York; his manifesto was the exhibition The Waking Dream, curated with Maria Morris Hambourg at the Metropolitan Museum of New York in 1993; the exhibition then traveled to Edinburgh and to the National Gallery in Washington (1994). They had a strength born of an urgency: to recover and save a neglected patrimony after so many wars, so many worlds destroyed. They knew how to look; they knew how to choose; they knew how to analyze every material aspect of a photograph. But choosing carried a latent fault as well, for the choice bore within it a moral judgment, one that thoroughly wearied the generation that followed, the generation that rejected, without appeal, all the old hierarchies. An end to discrimination! Enough of values founded on some divine superiority. Every image is worth another; every gaze is legitimate. This too was a strength — the end of an ancient contempt. But to refuse every hierarchy is to refuse every act of sorting. And whoever no longer chooses, accumulates. And so we have arrived at today’s situation, in which, after welcoming interesting examples of vernacular photography, the museums have gone on piling up pebbles to the point of indigestion. The aversion toward dealers and collectors has grown — both systematically discredited — while the history of photography was saved precisely by those who are today pushed to the margins: Cromer, Meserve, Sirot, Gernsheim, the Jammes, Wagstaff, Lunn, and, in Italy, Becchetti. Can we speak of two symmetrical errors? Perhaps. But the symmetry is imperfect. Let me insist once more: aesthetic research has irrigated and shaped every photographic practice, down to the most modest snapshot. The masterpiece does not stand above the three families: it is the sap that runs through them. To recognize the excellence of a work is not to judge the dignity of a human being. It is this confusion I wish to dispel, not the pursuit of beauty. To recognize that a work or a creation is excellent is one thing; to turn a famous face into a higher value, and an unknown face into a lesser one, is another. The first is fruitful. The second is the error I would advise against. On the other hand, every iconic image was born in a context; every artist, every operator, lived within a generation. One should follow Federico Zeri’s counsel: to put art history back into social history, every masterpiece back into its context. So then, a remedy for the new collector? To recognize once again, without judging.
In the Ocean of Material PhotographyOne warning remains. Collecting iconic images, photographs famous for being famous, is not what we are speaking of here. That is another market, the market of reproductions, where an image circulates like a Panini sticker or a rare Pokémon card, sometimes selling for millions. There one buys celebrity, not the object. We are speaking of material photography, of the original born in the sensible world. The only thing to verify is never to buy a reproduction at the price of an original. Nothing resembles a photograph so much as the photograph of a photograph. The collector must choose a theme. He is not bound to follow it, he may betray it at any moment. One may collect photographs taken at night, those where a cat appears, those where the figures have moved. The ocean of physical photographs offers so much! To distinguish the three tempos — the ephemeral, the daily, the long — not according to the dignity of persons, but according to the proper duration of things. It is the sorting of the fisherman, who separates what is kept from what goes back to the sea: he scorns nothing, but he knows what to carry home. The powerful force of evocation that saves a photograph may dwell in the face of an unknown as much as in that of a king; it is not the illustrious name that makes the long tempo, but something we recognize without being able to say what it is. To consume, to try, to hand down… To sort is not to discriminate. It is the act of one who prepares a transmission: as a family chooses which story will be repeated to the children and which anecdote will be left to fade, not because one life is worth less than another, but because not everything can be carried forward. Here is what is truly at stake. This is neither a pastime nor an investment. As material bibliography has built, across five hundred years of printed books, the solid ground of our written memory, so the material analysis of one hundred and fifty years of physical photography builds the ground of our visual memory. Every collector — even the most modest — lays a stone of this foundation. The museums, saturated, have lost this gesture and this science. It now falls to individuals to recover them: to single out, to analyze, to choose, in the ocean of material photography, the objects worth saving. Not for oneself, but for the cultures to come. Serge Plantureux, Senigallia, 9 June 2026
By way of conclusion and with apologies to Abraham Lincoln, whose words of November 1863 need only a few substitutions to speak of our own battlefield: “Ten score years ago our fathers brought forth upon this world a new invention, patiently conceived on several occasions and in several locations, and dedicated to the proposition that all men can create images. […] We have come to a situation when many libraries and museums will close or deaccession their collections soon after they have been digitally preserved. […] The brave artists and curators, living and dead, who struggled here, have created this vast legacy, far above our poor power to add or detract. […] that we here highly resolve that these pictures shall not have been created in vain — that this material patrimony shall have a future — and that the cultural heritage of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
PARTITA DOPPIA – Journal of art, photography and architecture ISSN 3103-5183 Subscription “D” for Digital Subscription “C” for Carta (printed in Italian on paper) Subscription “S” for Support or Surprises (printed in Italian on paper) Single copies – available in city of Senigallia and its surroundings Two easy payment methods 1. PayPal 2. Bank transfer If an invoice is required, please pay by bank transfer. For payments via PayPal, a 5% surcharge is required to cover fees, or you can select the “Friends and Family” option (when available). La Fotografia è la più bella delle collezioni … Senigallia, città della fotografia, ospitera nuovi spazi dedicato alla ricerca e promozione della fotografia. Atelier 41 si trova 41 via Fratelli Bandiera. Senigallia diventerà la Città delle collezioni. Any question : fotografia
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Serge Plantureux
Photographies
Expert de justice
près la Cour d’Appel de Paris