The Kimbell Art Museum presents Photography’s First Century: Masterworks from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, on view from 4 October 2026 through 17 January 2027, the museum’s first-ever exhibition celebrating the art of photography. The show traces the history of the medium’s first century of exploration and discovery, from the rise of daguerreotypes and calotypes in the 1840s to the age of modernism between the World Wars. Drawn from the rich holdings of the Bibliothèque nationale de France—one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of photographs in the world—the survey includes more than 170 images by 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 exhibition begins in the 1840s with photographs acquired by the Bibliothèque during the birth of the medium, a time when the library’s curators bought pictures chiefly as documents, for their information rather than their beauty. It ends in the 1930s, when the same images had come to be seen as art. Following the history of the medium in France, the show moves from the earliest, rival photographic inventions through the great campaigns to record the monuments of the nation and the wider world. From the commercial portrait studios of Second Empire Paris to the work of landscape artists by the sea, it turns to photography in the service of science, industry, and history, and then to the snapshot, the amateur, and the album.
The final section reveals the international Paris of the 1920s and 1930s, where, through creative and technical innovation, a hundred-year-old medium was invented anew. This period saw the emergence of photography as a modern art form, with practitioners like Man Ray and Brassaï pushing the boundaries of what the camera could capture. The exhibition is organized by the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Kimbell Art Museum in collaboration with Manifesto Expo, and coincides with France’s celebration of the bicentennial of the invention of photography, announced in 1839 by the French Academy of Sciences.
The curators are Madame Sylvie Aubenas, director emerita of the Department of Prints and Photography, and Madame Flora Triebel, curator of the nineteenth-century photography collection, at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. The Bibliothèque’s photography collection, which began with the acquisition of daguerreotypes in the 1840s, now holds more than 15 million images, making it one of the most significant repositories of photographic history in the world. The Kimbell Art Museum, located in Fort Worth, Texas, is known for its distinguished collection of European, Asian, and American art, and this exhibition marks a significant expansion of its engagement with photography as a fine art.
Image: Man Ray, Sleeping Woman, 1931, donated by artist’s estate, 1984 © Man Ray 2015 Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris 2026, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Department of Prints and Photography
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