Image: Gustave Le Gray, The Great Wave, Sète, 1857, legal deposit of the photographer, 1860. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Department of Prints and Photography
The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth will present ‘Photography’s First Century: Masterworks from the Bibliothèque nationale de France’ from October 4, 2026, through January 17, 2027. The museum describes it as its first exhibition devoted to the art of photography.
The show is organized by the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Kimbell Art Museum in collaboration with Manifesto Expo, and is mounted in conjunction with France’s celebration of the bicentennial of the invention of photography. The curators are Sylvie Aubenas, director emerita of the Department of Prints and Photography at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, and Flora Triebel, curator of its nineteenth-century photography collection.
Drawn from the library’s holdings, the survey brings together more than 170 images and follows the medium’s first hundred years, from the rival inventions of the 1840s to the modernism of the interwar years. Photographers represented include Henri Le Secq, Gustave Le Gray, Félix Tournachon (Nadar), Édouard Baldus, Louis-Émile Durandelle, Edgar Degas, Eugène Atget, Sonia Delaunay, André Kertész, Rogi André, Man Ray and Brassaï.
The museum frames the arc as a change in how such pictures were valued: the library acquired them at first for their documentary usefulness, and by the 1930s the same images were treated as art. The sequence runs from the earliest competing processes through the campaigns to record monuments in France and abroad, then to the portrait studios of Second Empire Paris, to photography used for science, industry and history, to the snapshot, the amateur and the album, and finally to the cosmopolitan Paris of the 1920s and 1930s.
Works highlighted by the museum include Gustave Le Gray’s ‘The Great Wave, Sète’ (1857), Brassaï’s ‘On the Boulevard Saint-Jacques’ (1930–32), Man Ray’s ‘Sleeping Woman’ (1931), Rogi André’s portrait of Peggy Guggenheim at the window of her Paris apartment (c. 1940) and Félix Nadar’s ‘Alexandre Dumas’ (1855), all from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Department of Prints and Photography. The image circulated with the announcement is Nadar’s ‘The Actress Marie Laurent, from Behind’, circa 1856, a salt print from a glass plate negative acquired in 1949 from the widow of Paul Nadar.
The exhibition is one of two on the Kimbell’s announced schedule, alongside ‘Treasures of the Pharaohs’, set for March 14 to September 19, 2027. Promotional support for the museum and its exhibitions is provided by American Airlines, NBC 5 and Fort Worth Report, with additional support from Arts Fort Worth.
