Rumpf collection - Victor Forbin
Victor Forbin (Paris, 1864—Clamart, 1947) was a journalist, explorer, and writer during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His articles and travel narratives were published in the daily press, but above all in specialized periodicals. We encounter his work in journals such as Excelsior, the Journal des Voyages, the Revue des deux mondes, L’Illustration, and Nature. He wrote under his own name, Victor Forbin, but also under several pseudonyms such as Jacques Dizier and Claude Albaret. His career is distinguished from the writers alongside whom he was published by his role as an iconographer, which began just after his journalistic debut. In this role, he provided the editorial offices with which he worked with images, demonstrating another aspect of the fabrication of information in the era of mass culture. The photographs that came into his possession were used to illustrate his articles as well as those of other authors.
In the early 2000s, Michèle Rumpf became the owner of the former home of Victor Forbin, where his photographic archives were located. She decided to entrust them to the Service Historique de la Défense (SHD). The 260 boxes currently conserved in Vincennes are organized in the same manner that they were at the time they were transferred. The 60,000 or so images in the collections—principally positive prints with a few thousand glass plates and flexible negatives—are divided geographically and then by sub-category according to the needs of the iconographer. The fonds preserve a great diversity of images, notably of news events and disasters taking place abroad. However, the majority of the collection is made up of pictures taken during the First World War on all fronts, but also during the conflicts that preceded it such as the Balkan wars (1912—1913) or the Italo-Turkish war (1911—1912). While some of the images come from the press services of armies or from photographers dispatched to picture news events, certain photographs in the fonds are the work of amateurs directly linked to Forbin and his company.
Bibliography
Charle, Cristophe. Le siècle de la presse (1830-1939), Paris: Seuil, 2004.
Letourneux, Matthieur, et Michela Passini, “Chapitre 7. Culture de masse et haute culture ‘à la française’: les circulations oubliées,” in Quentin Deluermoz, ed., D’ici et d’ailleurs. Histoires globales de la France contemporaine. Paris: La Découverte, 2021, pp. 285-322.