From Discovery to Exhibition:
The story of the Témoin photographs
While visiting a brocante at Lurcy-Levis in 2007, I saw at a stand a box containing small boxes of Lumiere glass negatives. I bought two of them. The following year I visited the same brocante and bought all the rest of them, some 170 glass-plate negatives. As a photographer these pictures were of great interest to me. I found that some were marked 1909. I also found out that some were taken in the city of Bourges. A great number of the pictures featured a family who were obviously wealthy, since the photographs featured their travels in Italy, Spain, and France. Investigating the pictures revealed more details. With the help of the Musee du Berry, in particular Beatrice de Chancel-Bardelot, I found that many pictures featured a festival in Bourges that looked like ‘Les fetes de l’argentier’ that took place in 1910. Beatrice, on seeing some of the pictures went out on her bicycle with her husband and emailed me back the same views taken with her digital camera, confirming the locations of four street scenes in Bourges.
My initial interest was that they were Lumiere plates, as these set the standards for all modern photography, with their speed and high resolution.
The pictures I thought most important featured a gentleman with a long white beard, who was pictured painting the church at Primelles. I forwarded these pictures to the Tate Gallery, The Courtauld Institute, and The National Gallery in London. Some curators thought the artist was Monet, while others thought it was Degas. But it is not either of those artists. Who it is, is still a mystery.
Beatrice de Chancel-Bardelot noted that an interior and exterior shot of a balcony were the present day Bibliotheque in Place Quatre Piliers. This led to the possibility that the family was the Témoins, who left hotel Témoin to the city of Bourges as a bibliotheque. Beatrice had a picture of Daniel Témoin, an eminent surgeon. He looked similar to the gentleman in my pictures, but then many gentlemen of the period looked similar. Documentary proof came from a photograph showing a 1906 Renault 6cv. An email to the Archives Departementales proved that the owner of the motor-car, whose number plate was shown in the picture, was Daniel Témoin of 4, Place Quatre Piliers.
Then in 2009 I met with Elisabeth Doussett of the Bibliotheque Municipale in Bourges, and found myself sitting in the room featured in one of the pictures. Elisabeth took my wife Robbie and me on a lovely tour of the library to all the rooms the public doesn’t see, including Dr Daniel Témoin’s consulting room, the kitchen, and dining room. Elisabeth’s office is the living room featured in the pictures, with Témoin, daughter and grand-daughters.
Elisabeth met with a descendant of the Témoins, M. Patrick Gallard de Zaleu, whose grandfather married one of the Témoin daughters. Patrick was able to identify many of the people and locations featured in the pictures.
Elisabeth also discovered the name of the family chateau, on the Cher, and that the Témoins owned a villa in Nice on the Cote D’Azur. A further and larger collection of glass-plate negatives, is held by the Van Iperen-Hoevens, also featuring the lives and travels of the family Daniel Témoin.
Having agreed that an exposition must be held of these photographs, Elisabeth and I made plans to display the collection.
First I had to make sure the negatives were in good condition, as we had decided to show only ‘real’ photographic prints, rather than digitally scanned images. This meant the negatives had to be cleaned, as most were dusty. Some had surface damage, while one or two were cracked, but not broken. I made some tests with a poor quality, double exposed negative, to clean it of dust. I ran the negative under cold running water, and used my clean finger to gently clear the dust from the surface. I kept immersion time down to less than 30 seconds, and dried the plates in sunshine on a windowsill. Comparison before and after this process showed a cleaner image with no added damage. I repeated this process with all 170 negatives, and all of them survived the cleaning.
As Northampton College has a large photographic facility, I was able to use a large, wall-mounted De Vere enlarger, with a 5x4 negative carrier, which I had to adapt to take the smaller negative size of the glass plates. The pictures were by no means easy to print, as some areas of the image had to be differentially printed, sometimes to twice the length of time of the rest of the image. Many pictures needed an exposure time of 20 minutes or more. The sheer size of them was also a slight problem, but I was able to complete the printing with no mishaps. It was a pleasure to see the images appear. Large photographs have a way of drawing you in to the picture, and you can see details that are invisible in smaller images.
There is a possibility that the photographer of these historic pictures is in the photograph in this exposition, showing a man featured with a camera on a tripod. He is likely to be the husband of one of Daniel Témoin’s daughters. But the collection, both mine and those held in the Van Iperen-Hoevens collection, feature images taken when the daughters were merely children, long before their marriages. So as yet this primary question remains essentially unanswered.
When I look at the family in these photographs, I feel I am a benign voyeur into their private lives. I also wonder about the journey these glass negatives made, from the original photographer or photographers, through two world wars, becoming separated from the Témoin family, and eventually being offered for sale at a brocante at Lurcy-Levis.
I am so glad the pictures found me, and that I did something about discovering their history.
Matt White
September 2010
Photographs of the 'vernissage' to follow
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