Some people collect stamps. Others collect Panini cards or folk dolls. Matthieu Nicol, for his part, accumulates images. The 45-year-old Frenchman, once an iconographer in the press and a website designer, spends entire days online looking for astonishing photographs. Not paper prints, but digital files that he stores on hard drives and in the cloud. For hours, he searches through visual banks and archive funds, looking for surprising shots.
For several years, he has become passionate about the photography collections of major American institutions such as NASA and the Library of Congress. Photos made available to everyone, as offered by the Gallica platform of the National Library of France. “We are sitting on a gold mine,” smiles Matthieu Nicol.
In 2022, he found a vein: the Combat Capabilities Development Command Soldier Center (known as DEVCOM), formerly called Natick Soldier Systems Center, in reference to its headquarters, located in Natick, a city in Massachusetts. Little known to the general public, this entity of the American army is responsible for stewardship and has the mission of designing food rations, uniforms, shelters, tents and everything that accompanies the daily life of soldiers, on the ground as well as in the barracks. “It’s a sort of laboratory where the working and living conditions of an entire society, the hundreds of thousands of people belonging to the army, are invented,” explains Matthieu Nicol.
Connected clothes
At the beginning of the 2020s, a collection of fourteen thousand photos from the center’s archives was declassified. Crazy about culinary imagery, to the point of having created a very followed Instagram account (@vintage_food_photography) filled with pâtés en croute, shrimp climbing on mayonnaise or beef aspics, Matthieu Nicol selected the images from this trove related to gastronomy. He designed a work of it, Better Food For Our Fighting Men, released in 2022 and reissued in March by RVB Books.
This summer, he presented at the Rencontres d’Arles the second part of this work, “Fashion Army”, this time devoted to clothing. It obviously includes camouflage jackets, night vision goggles and bulletproof vests. But also outfits for pregnant women, underwear, golden shorts, connected clothes, fabrics adapted to extreme temperatures. From this collection he designed a book, published by SPBH Editions, on glossy paper and with a soft cover, like a fashion magazine.
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