The Cromer collection of nineteenth-century French photography

Abstract

"In the early 20th century, Parisian photographer, amateur historian, and collector Gabriel Cromer (1873-1934) amassed a vast collection that traced photography's prehistory, invention, and subsequent development to about 1890. His dream was to found a national museum of the photographic arts in France. Although Cromer's ambition was never realized, his collection was central to the establishment of the world's first museum dedicated to photography: the George Eastman Museum. The Cromer Collection of Nineteenth-Century French Photography considers the origin and circulation of the collection as well as the influence it has had on photography as a field of study. The book's six essays, written by French and American scholars, explore the Cromer Collection's complex passage across markets, borders, and functions. For more than half a century, curators and scholars worldwide have drawn extensively on the Gabriel Cromer Collection for exhibitions and publications; this book provides the first focused scholarly study of the foundational resource"--

Contents

A Story of Labels : Gabriel Cromer, the Photographer, the Collection, and the Museum / Éléonore Challine -- A Fraternity of Rivals : The Circle of Collectors around Gabriel Cromer / Anne de Mondenard -- From Paris to Rochester : Eastman Kodak's 1939 Purchase of the Gabriel Cromer Collection / Heather A. Shannon -- A New History of Photography : Beaumont Newhall and the Gabriel Cromer Collection / Ellen Handy -- A Belated Acquisition : The Gabriel Cromer Collection at the Bibliothèque nationale / Sylvie Aubenas -- Making Photography's History in Interwar Paris : Gabriel Cromer and Walter Benjamin / Jacob W. Lewis.