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SOCIÉTÉ FRANÇAISE DE
PHOTOGRAPHIE (SFP)
French organization, 1854 to present
The Société française de photographie (SFP) was
founded November 15, 1854, by seventeen former
members of the Société heliographique (SH) (1851–53)
and a number of prominent fi gures in the sciences, the
arts, government, and society—non-photographers as
well as practitioners. The character of the earlier Société
heliographique, a rather relaxed, genteel group with
meeting rooms in the home of its president, Colonel
de Montfort, intimate photographic soirees in private
homes, and a self-described identity as an organization
for “those looking in their leisure time for the charm of
a noble interest and the attraction of an elevated preoc-
cupation” (Janis 1983, 42) was that of an exclusive
group of enlightened amateurs. The SFP adopted a
more formal structure appropriate to a learned society
organized on the model of the French Academies. The
precise connections between the earlier organization
and the SFP have yet to be traced. Although many
former SH members became members of the SFP, the
SFP was not a continuation of the earlier organization.
In fact, prominent members of the earlier group are
notable in their absence, for example, Henri LeSecq
and Ernest Lacan, while others, such as Eduard Baldus
only joined later.
The Société française de photographie defi ned itself
under its organizing statutes as “an artistic and scientifi c
association of men studying photography.” Membership
was limited and exclusive. By charter there would be
two hundred regular members, and an additional two
hundred corresponding members from outside Paris; a
membership number no doubt based on the model of
the two hundred member Institut de France. Ten of the
founding members of the SFP were members of the
Institut de France, including the fi rst president Victor
Regnault. They also counted among their founders,
members of the nobility, i.e., Count Aguado, Baron
Gros, and Baron Humbert de Molard. Included among
the ninety-three founders were representatives from the
arts—Eugène Delacroix, Vallou de Villeneuve, Louis
Robert, Eugène Durieu and Eugène Cuvelier—and
sciences—the botanist Brébisson, naturalists Geof-
frey-Saint-Hilaire and Louis Rousseau, and physicist
Léon Foucault. Several members came from the mid
and upper ranks of the Second Empire bureaucracy.
And, of course, a number of photographers associated
with the Société Heliographique—Hippolyte Bayard,
Gustave LeGray, Charles Nègre, Blanquart-Evrard,
Léon de Laborde—were also founding members. Victor
Regnault, a physical chemist, director of the Imperial
Porcelain Manufactury at Sèvres, and a photographer,
served as the SFP’s fi rst president, a position he held
until 1868. By 1855 membership had grown to 165
members. The aspirations of the organization were
defi ned in the fi rst issue of the Bulletin de Société Fran-
çais de Photographie (January 1855) which explicitly
denied “any consideration foreign to purely scientifi c
and artistic goal[s]...[other than] the pure love of the
photographic art and science” (McCauley 1994, 41).
McCauley identifi ed a strong anti-commercial bias in
the membership and program of the SFP and notes that
during a period characterized by the explosion of com-
mercial photography studios and the fi rms serving them
(1850–1870), relatively few commercial operators were
to be found in its membership rolls.
The SFP’s administrative committee comprising fi f-
teen members and offi cers organized regular bimonthly
meetings which were conducted under formal rules of
order like those governing the Academies. Committees
were established to investigate reports, review scien-
tifi c submissions—generally to do with innovations in
processes and equipment—and to vet technical com-
muniqués. Meetings and the work of the committees
were reported in the Bulletin de Société Français de
Photographie, which also announced competitions, al-
most exclusively of a scientifi c or technical nature, and
published the prize-winning submissions. The secretary
carried on lengthy correspondence with a number of
foreign photographic societies excerpts of which ap-
peared in the Bulletin. The Bulletin quickly settled into
a dual role as the means of communicating the work of
the SFP and its members, and a journal devoted to the
scientifi c and technical aspects of photography. Issues
that might have been of interest to commercial photogra-
phers—laws governing photographic rights, or advances
specifi cally geared to commercial interests in the rapidly
industrializing practice of photography—were not ad-
dressed. It was no doubt due to the lack of support for
commercial interests that in 1859 Ernest Mayer, of the
fi rm Mayer frères et Pierson, founded the Union pho-
tographique as a mutual aid society for photographic
workers.
Within months of its founding, the SFP began to
organize photographic exhibitions; the fi rst opened in
September 1855 and coincided with the Paris Universal
Exposition which featured a remarkably strong show-
ing of photographic work. Between 1855 and 1876, the
SFP organized eleven photographic exhibitions—1857,
1859, 1861, 1863, 1864, 1865, 1869, 1870, 1874, and
1876—a continuous program of exhibitions which
roughly coincided with the Paris painting salons. Exhibi-
tions were open to members and non-members, and to
foreigner practitioners. The SFP’s exhibitions quickly
achieved the status of the photographic salon on the
order of the offi cial paintings salons. The 1859 SFP
exhibition was held in the Palais des Champs-Elysées in
rooms adjacent to the Salon, the government sponsored