Première Fois / Premières Photos is a story about beginnings — the very first images photography ever produced, and everything a "first" can mean. What is an inaugural image, after all? A proof, a test, a feat, a failure, an event, a memory, or a trigger? This playful yet erudite exhibition travels through two hundred years of photographic innovation, great and small, to gather a whole anthology of "first times": first shots, scoops, never-before-seen pictures, the oldest surviving image, the first photo to make a front page, and more besides. These firsts are by turns technical, aesthetic, scientific, and societal — running from the earliest experiments of the medium's pioneers, women and men alike, all the way to recent images capturing the birth of stars in the primordial universe, by way of the first photographs transmitted at a distance, the first performed image, the first photography book, and even those tender, universal "firsts" like the first day of school — not to mention the very first "louse" in the history of photography.
At its heart, the exhibition hands the floor to iconic photographers who recount, in pictures, their own "first photo" and, through it, the moment they first met photography. Visitors discover the early attempts and debut frames of Bernard Plossu, Édouard Boubat, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Vinca Petersen, and Martin Parr. Around them, the show draws out the threads connecting today's innovations to yesterday's experiments, while also telling the economic and industrial story underpinning the inventors' research — their strategies for securing recognition and posterity through the protection of their intellectual and commercial property. From the "photocycliste" to the "photopiège," the ingenious patents and gloriously offbeat trademarks are a delight in themselves, and the darker side of invention surfaces too, in the controversies sparked by the races toward innovation — the bitterly disputed paternity of colour photography being a fine example. Tests, trials, and inventions that led nowhere all get their due. Samuel Beckett's words — "try again, fail again, fail better" — run through the whole show like a guiding thread, a reminder that there was never a single invention of photography but many.
In all, the exhibition brings together 200 photographs by more than 50 historical and modern photographers, including true incunabula of the medium: Daguerre's first daguerreotype, Niépce's pioneering images of 1826 and 1827, alongside more contemporary works from the 20th and 21st centuries. It is curated by Luce Lebart — photography historian and independent artistic director, co-curator of the Fotografia Europea festival, researcher for the Archive of Modern Conflict collection, and author of numerous books including A World History of Women Photographers, co-edited with Marie Robert. The exhibition forms part of her programming for the 2026–2027 season at the Pavillon Populaire, alongside a retrospective devoted to Lucien Hervé, whose curation she has entrusted to Virginie Chardin, a specialist in humanist photography.
Conceived for every kind of visitor, Première Fois / Premières Photos is a warm, surprising, and thought-provoking journey into the many origins of the image — to be discovered free of charge at the Pavillon Populaire, in the heart of Montpellier.