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 struck gold: the Combat Capabilities Development Command Soldier Center (known as DEVCOM), formerly called the 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 quartermastering and is tasked with imagining food rations, uniforms, shelters, tents and everything that accompanies the daily life of soldiers, in the field as well as in the barracks. “It is a kind of laboratory where the working and living conditions of an entire society are invented, the hundreds of thousands of people belonging to the army,” explains Matthieu Nicol.
Connected clothes
In the early 2020s, a collection of fourteen thousand photographs from the center’s archives had been declassified. Crazy about culinary imagery, to the point of having created a very popular Instagram account (@vintage_food_photography) filled with pâtés en croûte, shrimp climbing mayonnaise or beef aspics, Matthieu Nicol selected images related to gastronomy from this treasure trove. He designed a book from it, Better Food For Our Fighting Men, released in 2022 and reissued in March by RVB Books.
This summer, he presents at the Rencontres d’Arles the second part of this work, “Fashion Army”, this time devoted to clothing. There are obviously camouflage jackets, night vision goggles and bulletproof vests. But also sets for pregnant women, underwear, golden shorts, connected clothes, fabrics adapted to extreme temperatures. From this set he designed a work, published by SPBH Editions, on glossy paper and with a soft cover, like a fashion magazine.
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