In 1923, in a Paris studio, a man in a dark suit stares intently at an egg balanced in an egg cup, as if waiting for it to confess. This photograph opens “Premières fois / Premières photos” (“First Times / First Photographs”), the exhibition Luce Lebart has curated for the Pavillon Populaire in Montpellier (France), running through November 1st, to mark the Bicentennial of photography. Two hundred years of mislaid patents, tiny beginnings and founding gestures, told room by room by the woman who gathered them.

That egg belongs to a device called a mirœuf, a curious household appliance from 1923, unveiled the following year at the Salon des appareils ménagers, which judges the freshness of a shell through a slightly tilted mirror, on a principle close to that of the camera itself. A little further along in the same preamble sit sealed envelopes, deposited by inventors with the academies of science to protect their secrets. They are opened, Luce Lebart notes, only in the event of a priority dispute, as happened with Louis Ducos du Hauron’s patent for the invention of color. The rest remain sealed, silent guardians of an inventive 19th century.

Playful, but never idle: the word “firsts” itself took time to settle. Luce Lebart had first imagined something more technical, more serious, before realizing the chosen term would be more poetic, capable of humor too. “This isn’t an exhibition just for specialists”, she recalls. “Here, we’re popular. For me, it’s really important to be accessible to everyone. Otherwise, it doesn’t interest me.” The wall texts, deliberately short, are written “for people in a hurry”.

Solid-core stellar dendrite snowflakes, between 1885 and 1931 © Wilson Alwyn Bentley.

The same spirit runs through the neighboring corridor, where clusters of crystals catch the eye: the snowflakes of Wilson Bentley, an amateur meteorologist from Vermont who, from adolescence, attached a camera to his microscope and devoted his entire life to the pursuit. More than four thousand snowflakes photographed, each one different. “Every crystal is unique, they are all firsts”, sums up the exhibition’s curator, turning that plain fact into a method for the whole show.

Oblivion as part of invention

This playful stance doesn’t rule out political ones. The exhibition proper opens with a woman, and the choice is no accident. “For me, it was obviously interesting, important, and political to open a photography exhibition not with pioneers, but with a pioneer,” Luce Lebart explains. Anna Atkins, an English botanist trained in photography by her father, published between 1843 and 1853 the first book illustrated with photography, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions. She signed her plates with the initials A. A., long read as those of an “Anonymous Amateur,” before her name was restored to her.

This pioneer opens the way to a gallery of far more anonymous figures. Next comes the constellation of patents, 4,000 filed in the 19th century and held in the archives of the Institut national de la propriété industrielle (National Institute of Industrial Property), 4,000 inventors of photography of whom, more often than not, only a name on a form remains. The “point Nadar,” a mark accompanying his patent for aerial photography, is still used today in aerial survey work. The devices designed to hold bodies still in studio settings explain, in hindsight, the stiffness of period portraits. One camera stand doubles as a bicycle kickstand, much to the amusement of Montpellier’s city hall, in a city where people cycle freely.

Laminaria Fascia, from Photographs of British Algae © Anna Atkins

The first television set, Burgundy, 1963 © Janine Niepce

© Georges Shiras (1859–1942, United States)

From the inventors’ anonymity to the trademarks’ fame is often just one patent away. The trademark filings tell another story, that of the shift from laboratory experiment to factory product. “These trademarks really show photography’s shift from an experimental object to a factory product”, notes Luce Lebart. Kodak, a rootless word chosen by George Eastman for its pronounceability in every language, embodies on its own the birth of branding.

Oblivion, however, can also strike the victors. Two Niépce daguerreotypes face each other across the same wall, one preserved, the other engraved by Niépce’s own hand in tribute to Daguerre: “My dear devoted friend Daguerre”. The View from the Window at Le Gras, taken in 1826 and held in Austin, Texas, was only identified as the first photograph in the early 1950s, when collectors rediscovered it. Before that, another image, now lost, held that role, including in Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. “It’s a bit like the Loch Ness monster, cryptozoology,” Luce Lebart jokes. A war memorial in Chalon still bears, because of this confusion, the mistaken date of 1822. The centenary was celebrated in 1924, the 150th anniversary in 1989. In 2026, both dates are marked at once.

Against this belated glory, the other side of the story: Hippolyte Bayard, inventor of a rival process, staged his own Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man in 1840, having received neither the recognition nor the pension granted to Daguerre and Niépce’s heir. His images, never fixed, fade in the light before reviving in darkness, as if the process replayed, each time, the oblivion its inventor suffered.

Ghardaïa, Sahara, shot with a Brownie Flash, 1958 © Bernard Plossu

Seeing far, seeing fast

After oblivion, brilliance. Color fills an entire room: the experiments of Louis Ducos du Hauron, the Lumière brothers’ first Autochromes, and the 68,000 Autochromes of the Archives de la Planète (Archives of the Planet) gathered by Albert Kahn, among them the first color photographs of Algeria, including a stereoscopic anaglyph image of a Berber woman, long wrongly credited to an American invention.

A full chapter is devoted to long-distance transmission. During the Siege of Paris in 1871, René Dagron microfilmed messages to send them by carrier pigeon between Paris and Bordeaux. Arthur Batut, for his part, wrote a treatise on kite photography. Nadar backdated his patent for aerial photography, actually taken in 1868, after an American had beaten him to it. Édouard Belin transmitted the first landscape, the first portrait by wire, and in 1931 Pope Pius XI himself posed before the bélinographe to be transmitted by wireless, the Church having, since the Annunciation, always followed questions of long-distance communication closely.

The same vertigo of capturing things from afar runs through the room devoted to clouds, which can be neither bottled nor stuffed. Perhaps that is why meteorologists, unable to study the cloud itself, became photographers of clouds, giving rise to the first international cloud atlas, whose current edition still derives directly from it. Luce Lebart is devoting her next book to the subject, out in the coming days.

Luce Lebart has also unearthed, in Montpellier’s municipal archives, the city’s oldest photographs of skateboarding. Further on, Étienne-Jules Marey’s famous cat, caught at the exact moment it turns in midair, is a reminder that chronophotography fed medical research just as much as sports photography.

After the inventors and the technical feats, the final stretch of the show changes register: the photographers themselves get to speak. A photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson, taken in 1922 with his group of fellow scouts, is kept at his foundation. In 1992, Agnès b. asked European photographers to write out, by hand, the story of their first photograph for her exhibition “Première photo” (“First Photo”) at the Galerie du Jour. Willy Ronis told his there. “There are no two first photographs, every photograph is unique, they all tell us something”, Luce Lebart sums up, having chosen to let that voice speak for itself rather than rewrite it as a wall text.

Luce Lebart also shows the first photographed Chinese atomic bomb test, but searched in vain for an equivalent French image. “I looked for the French one, I never found it,” she says, showing instead an indirect photograph: residents of the Sahara learning from the newspaper of the Gerboise Bleue test, and Malian students demonstrating two hundred kilometers from the site of the blast. The absence, here, says a great deal.

From that missing photograph to the ones splashed across a front page is a short step: the exhibition closes on the question of the front page. In 1980, Libération marked the death of Sartre, its co-founder, with its first-ever full-page photograph, a format the paper would later use for the obituaries of its own photographers, Sebastião Salgado and Martine Franck among them.

Two hundred years of firsts, then, and a conviction that runs through the whole show: invention, in photography as elsewhere, is never a solitary flash. It is made of trials, unclaimed patents, images that vanish before they are recognized. “Try again. Fail again. Fail better”, Beckett once wrote. Luce Lebart has made it a thread running through the whole exhibition, and Montpellier an open-air laboratory.

The exhibition “Premières fois / Premières photos” is on view at the Pavillon Populaire in Montpellier through November 1, 2026. Catalogue with texts by Luce Lebart, Jean-Paul Gandolfo and Amandine Gabriac, published by Spector Books, 2026.

The Egg Before the Hen, the Photograph Before History

Oblivion as part of invention

Seeing far, seeing fast