Valois albums
The fonds Valois contains more than 50,000 photographs created by the Section photographique de l’armée (SPA) during World War One. Created in 1915 in order to counter German photo propaganda, the SPA was a collaboration between the École des Beaux-Arts, the Ministry of War, the Ministry of Public Instruction, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which mobilized professional photographers to document the war for the purposes of propaganda as well as the creation of national patrimony and future public memory of the conflict. While the Minister of War charged the photographers with their general mission and assigned them to sections of the war front and the home front, the ministry of public instruction and the Beaux Arts took charge of logistics and funding, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs diffused the photos to the press in allied and neutral countries. In 1917, the SPA and the Section Cinématographique de l’armée (SCA) were merged for efficiency in to the Section photographique et cinématographique de l’armée (SPCA). The effort was organized on an industrial scale, and generated a vast number of photographic prints in a wide variety of formats. Production increased considerably from 1916, and 2,250,000 prints in all formats had been produced by September 1917, by which time the SPA photo labs were making 6,000 prints per day. The SPCA also organized numerous photo exhibitions and published several million postcards as well. The photographs were later arranged into albums organized by place of battle, which today make up the “Albums Valois” held by La Contemporaine. Collectively, these albums contain more than 50,000 photographs, and are also available online through the L’Argonnaute digital library.
Bibliography:
Guillot, Hélène. “La section photographique de l’armée et la Grande Guerre: De la creation en 1915 à la non-dissolution.” Revue historique des armées, 258, 2010, pp. 110-117.
Pichel, Beatriz. Picturing the Western Front: Photography, Practices, and Experiences in First World War France. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021.