Theatre Photography in Nineteenth Century France: Document, Archive or Pure Fiction?

Abstract

Indoor performance photography, which was born in France on the occasion of the Paris World Exhibition in 1889, remains a problematic theatrical and media object to this day. But at the Belle Epoque and until the Second World War at least, it requires to be approached with all the more caution because it is always the fruit of multiple manipulations, either at the time of the making of the shots (mandatory posing of actors, specific lighting, etc.), or at the time of their “post-production” (printing, but especially edition in review or volume). A complex and particularly rich object that must be studied in its context (publications or archives), stage photography is then offered as much as a document to be deciphered as a fiction to be deconstructed.