In the early years of the 20th century, Céline Laguarde established herself as an international name in the first artistic movement in the history of photography: pictorialism. Rediscovered thanks to the “Who’s Afraid of Women Photographers? 1839-1945” exhibition (Musée d’Orsay and Musée de l'Orangerie, 2015), much of the artist’s personal collection was acquired by the Musée d’Orsay. The retrospective scheduled for autumn 2024 is the first to be devoted to Céline Laguarde, and also the first to be exclusively dedicated to a woman photographer active in France before the First World War. Hence, Céline Laguarde’s body of work is set to re-emerge after a century of oblivion. The “Céline Laguarde photographer” exhibition aims first and foremost to reveal a body of work of unsuspected quality, variety and longevity. Through around a hundred and forty of the artist’s original prints, selectively compared with photographs by her male and female contemporaries, the exhibition also showcases the evolutions and continuities, influences and dialogues, and originality and specificities that characterize Céline Laguarde’s work.

The exhibition and accompanying catalogue – the first book devoted to the artist – result from ground-breaking research and are built upon a reconstitution of Céline Laguarde’s corpus, biography, career and critical acclaim. Her individual trajectory is also considered in a triple context: that of an unusually eclectic network of artistic, literary, musical and scientific social ties; the regional, national and international context of art photography; and the still little-known context of female photography in France at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, analyzed here for the first time.

Hence, this retrospective devoted to Céline Laguarde is an opportunity to make a real discovery: not only of a woman photographer now acknowledged to have been the most important to have emerged in France during the first seventy-five years of the medium’s existence, but also, and above all, of an artist already recognized in her lifetime as one of the major photographers of her day.