Souvenirs of Touraine, the Neurdein brothers and tourist photography

Mont Saint-Michel, the Eiffel Tower, the chateaux of the Loire Valley... The mere mention of these monuments and landmarks of French tourism conjures up images that combine form, perspective and a sense of familiarity.

Photography was used very early on to bring tourist sites to life, and companies began specializing in this field in the last third of the 19^th century to capitalize on the business opportunities created by the emergence of leisure travel as a result of the development of road and rail networks.

Neurdein frères (1863-1918) was one of these Parisian companies, which travelled the country, photographing for tourists and distributing their images more widely in the world of publishing and illustrated objects.

Photographers thus developed a standardized way of depicting towns and monuments, in search of the "ideal" viewpoint.

The city of Tours and the Touraine region were included in the tours planned by Etienne and Antonin Neurdein, and were the subject of several photographic reports, produced in particular by Tours-based operator René Parâtre. The cathedral, the Psalette cloister, the new town hall, the train station and the Prébendes d'Oé garden all became subjects of photographs and postcards at the turn of the century.

The success of this new way of consuming images forced the Neurdein company to expand its production, and new postcard themes were introduced, from the Loire floods to the Touraine wine harvest, revealing the faces that populated the images.

The exhibition features original documents, photographs on albumen paper, old postcards, fascicles and old booklets devoted to tourism in Touraine at the end of the 19^th century, as well as facsimiles of iconic photographs by the Neurdein brothers.

Marie-Ève Bouillon is a photography historian who works at the Archives nationales in the Mission photographie.

She defended a doctoral thesis at EHESS, special mention of the jury of the PSL-SHS thesis prize in 2018, which analyzes the systems of an economy of photography and postcards between 1863 and 1918, from the point of view of the players in production, in particular Neurdein frères.

Her research focuses in particular on the photographic industry, the postcard, tourist imaginaries and photographic archives.

She has published in the journals Études photographiques, Mil neuf cent, 303, and has contributed to the collective works Les Archives de la planète (ed. Lienart), Le magasin du monde (Fayard), Cartes postales illustrées en guerre (CNRS éditions), Un monde en cartes postales (ed. Le mot et le reste), among others.