The long haul out to St Cyr from our hotel was well worth the wait. Fort St Cyr is an impressive, imposing place. Originally built in the 1870s after the Franco-Prussian war, the fort was designed to help protect the capital. Very isolated at the time, the fort could hold around 2000-3000 soldiers. After World War I, the fort began a civilian life as a meteorological station and school, and in the 1980s the fort began its current life as an archive. Thanks to the efforts of Henri Langlois, the French Cineclub archives were stored at the fort, all 40,000 of them. The fort is now split between a cinematic film wing and a photography wing, most of which are underground and have earth covered walls. This set up has its issues, steady temperatures and humidity readings are almost non-existent.
Bevan hanging out outside Fort St Cyr.
The fort is quite the facility, even on the outside. The inside features a lot of long hallways that hold four cold storage areas. The fort even has nitrate within its walls, although separated. There are roughly five to ten million objects within the collection, from negatives, prints, autochromes, plates (of varying sizes), and paper archives, such as bills, receipts and orders. Around 150,000 of the 800,000 digitized images have been put on the fort’s website. The archive uses digitization for the dissemination of images more so than the conservation of them, and their facilities reflect the demands from the public. The usual dpi the fort goes for from an image is 3072, although they do aim for 6044 if the negative is over a certain size. The fort does do its own printing for exhibitions, usually 40x50 cms or 50x60 cms.
An 8x10 plate by Felix Nadar.
Marie Robert, one of the fort’s archivists gave us a walking tour of the facility. She showed us one of the conservation studios in which one of her colleagues, Patrick, is working on something really cool; the entire archive of negatives of Felix Nadar. There are glass plates everywhere in the room, many of which are broken. The fort is lucky to have Nadar’s business books as well, and that Nadar was a scrupulous writer. His records include who sat for him, their addresses in many cases, dates and how many prints the clients wanted. The fort is working on this inventory form the beginning of the studio’s existence, starting in 1850, all the way through to 1942. The studio was taken over by Nadar’s son Paul after his death, and closed altogether in 1948. The state purchased the studio’s inventory from Paul’s widow, and the collection was split. The negatives went to St Cyr and the prints went to the National Library. Despite the split, the collection was untouched for many years, and in 1980 was declared to be a national monument. It was then where it was inventoried and studied. At current count, the negative collection stands at 250,000, although that figure is being worked on.
Some of Nadar's broken plates.
So many plates!
I am truly amazed by this room. The stacks of plates are fascinating; we can see little hints of images peeking out on the plates, and on the shards on the table. Patrick showed us some the registries that the collection came with, and how he’s been using them to identify the plates for the archive. I can only imagine how much of a godsend those registries are to the collection; it would be a nightmare to sort out these plates otherwise. He also pointed out some the archival materials that the cleaned and catalogued plates are going into. It’s quite the operation, especially for one man.
Archival envelopes!
After a quick lunch with the staff, we return to the archive to see a few more fonds, including Kertesz and Ronis. We then moved to the cold storage in the basement, where we saw even more Nadar! At first we were shown some of the other plates that are still being repaired and catalogued, still in the brown paper and strings they came in. It provided quite the contrast for the cold room that Robert showed us next. The archival paper enclosure and aluminum boxes are very well organized, and slightly different. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the boxes the fort was using for their storage.
Open!
Closed!
The basement also featured something some of the second year students were very interested in from the get-go, photo albums by Jacques Henri Lartigue. The albums themselves were in amazing condition, along with the images inside, some of them looking as if they had been printed a week ago. It was amazing to see this kind of work in such good condition. It likens a bit to the Régnaut album we saw the Société Française de Photographie, since the album is composed of images that Lartigue liked or was personally linked to. In some cases, the photographs featured events and people he was close to.
An album of Lartigue's.
On the inside.
All photographs by A Cook.
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