Preface

In 1923, Geneva played host to the Exposition nationale suisse de photographie (Swiss National Photography Exhibition), which ran for an entire summer at the Bâtiment électoral. The exhibition’s aim was to commemorate the centennial of Nicéphore Niépce’s invention of photography. Geneva’s photographers were especially involved in mounting the event. Several thousand items were put on public display during what was probably the greatest event in Geneva dedicated to photography to this day. The “History Section” of the show featured a series of daguerreotypes that belonged to Hélène Le Fort-Diodati, the great-granddaughter of the man who had taken them, the Genevan philhellene Jean-Gabriel Eynard (1775-1863). The central role Eynard played in photography’s early years was not overlooked. Yet curiously the spectacular exhibition of 1923 marked the end of Genevans’ interest in a body of work that is exceptional nonetheless. Eynard would have to wait more than half a century before his native city would once again take an interest in his work.

It can be said then, without exaggeration, that Genevan institutions largely missed their historic appointment with the daguerreotypist. Seeing his images as merely portraits of members of venerable Genevan families and not technical and artistic tokens of photography’s origins, they trained a negligent eye on these daguerreotypes when they weren’t actually helping to disperse Eynard’s plates. It is not insignificant that in the 1960s it was the sharp eye of the photographer, collector, and historian of photography Michel Auer that rediscovered Eynard and ancient photography in Geneva generally.

Thirty years later, Genevan institutions set to work to make up for lost ground. They located in their collections the first tokens of photography, isolated the most fragile or most remarkable pieces in order to restore them, studied them, and exhibited them as genuine treasures.

The critical acclaim which Eynard’s body of work eventually met with, told in the introductory chapters of the present catalogue, is a textbook case. A cultural legacy cannot exist without a preliminary act of recognition of its value to the culture. Today the Bibliothèque de Genève is fully aware of its responsibilities. In 2013, the library avoided a fresh loss and a new scattering of Jean-Gabriel Eynard’s legacy by purchasing a trove of 135 of his daguerreotypes that had remained in obscurity until then, one of the most important acquisitions of ancient photography achieved in Switzerland in recent decades. Our institution is also taking an active role in safeguarding this very fragile heritage, which is conserved in the climate-controlled storage rooms of the library’s Centre d’iconographie, where its visual arts collections are maintained. It has inventoried the Eynard collection’s contents and launched a range of preventive conservation initiatives. The City of Geneva is proud to possess today one of the most extensive photography collections going back to the initial years that followed the French government’s 1839 announcement heralding the invention of the daguerreotype.

When it launched its “Eynard” project in 2008, the Bibliothèque sought to take yet another step forward by setting itself the ambitious goal of putting together the catalogue raisonné for the work of Jean-Gabriel Eynard. This choice was easily justified in terms of the historical importance of a figure whose work as a daguerreotypist is hailed in several ancient treatises on the nascent medium. The number of pieces still conserved, notably at the Bibliothèque de Genève, and the absence of any true survey formed an additional motivation. The idea then was not only to document our institution’s collections but also to embrace a broad overview of a major body of work which is conserved today in Switzerland as well as in other corners of Europe and North America.

The project’s timeframe – twelve years – shows that such an enterprise is no easy thing to pull off in an institution that must meet a host of demanding responsibilities. The project, moreover, was not spared several complications and met with tragedy in the sudden death in 2012 of the originator and driving force of the enterprise, the late lamented Serge Rebetez. The project was relaunched in 2017 after an understandable pause of several years. I would like to extend my warm thanks here, if I may, to all those whose dedication and discipline made this undertaking a success, be they curators, archivists, art historians, or conservators; their names are listed on a dedicated page of the catalogue. My sincere thanks also go to the organizations that have generously provided this project with their financial support (Office fédéral de la culture, Fondation Leenards, and Memoriav).

The Eynard catalogue today is over 470 identified daguerreotype plates, around half of which are in the Bibliothèque de Genève. This remarkable collection, one of the most important of its kind in Europe, covers a period that begins barely a few months after Daguerre’s process was made public and extends for fifteen years, from 1840 to 1855. Certain pieces are only known thanks to later traditional (silver-halide based) photographic reproductions and have proved impossible to locate. Others have vanished but are attested by written sources. Such is the case of the first plates done in Rome or those featuring the French monarch Louis-Philippe I and his family.

To ensure a successful conclusion for the project, those involved seized upon its interruption to rethink its scope and refocus it first and foremost on the Centre d’iconographie’s collections, even though all the pieces identified as being the work of Eynard had been described. The second major decision was organizational in nature. The Bibliothèque did not want the catalogue raisonné to be an object turned inward and shut up on itself, independent of the rest of our institution’s activities, the way a piece of university research might be. It had to be able to evolve and to be integrated with all the documents published by the Centre d’iconographie and eventually, we trust, by the City of Geneva. The catalogue then has been put together within the City of Geneva’s central museum database. While this has not been without its share of production problems, it will make updating the catalogue easier over time. Finally, this vast project presents a true challenge that has to be met, namely, that the work accomplished and the connections that will be forged between the entries describing the daguerreotypes of the catalogue and those of the collections will be mutually enriching, while offering researchers new information on an essential period of Genevan history that witnessed the city making its way into the modern age.