Par
Anne-Sophie Hourdeaux
Published on
Jan 19, 2025 at 12:00 p.m.
Of Zola we think we know everything. The committed humanist writer, author of the extremely famous Rougon-Macquart cycle, the journalist, great defender of human rights in general and of Dreyfus in particular and his famous “J’accuse…!” “. But do we know that Zola was passionate about photography which allowed him to understand what he called “the mechanism of my eye”? The Wimille media library (Pas-de-Calais) immerses us in this facet of the author-artist.
In the 19th centurye century, photography, born in 1839, was still a revolutionary art at the end of the century and the turn of the 1900s. Zola was, like many of his contemporaries, an autodidact in the subject coupled with an experimenter always on the lookout for new things .
Travel, intimacy, urban scenes…
He excelled both in travel photographs and in those which reveal to us the intimacy of his family life (his friends, his children, his wife, his mistress, his interior) or even a forgotten Paris where carriages and urban scenes rub shoulders photos of the Universal Exhibition.
A perfectionist in everything he did, he worked every day on his books and images.
-30 prints
We discover through the writer’s photographs his undeniable artistic temperament who captures the moment with the taste for detail that we know from his novels. “In my opinion,” he said, “you cannot say that you have seen something thoroughly unless you have taken a photograph of it revealing a lot of details which otherwise could not even be discerned. »
We will find around thirty modern prints made from the original negatives.
Designed by the Zola Center of ITEM (Institute of Modern Texts and Manuscripts) and the Media Library of Heritage and Photography, this exhibition, curated by Bruno Martin and Olivier Lumbroso, invites us to discover the hidden side of a Émile Zola who surprises us.
Until January 31, 2025, Media Library Center, Espace Pilâtre de Rozier, 3, rue de Ledinghem. Friday January 24, 6:30 p.m., conference by Bruno Martin, curator of the exhibition: “Émile Zola, author and artist photographer”. Info: 03 21 83 36 43.
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