'Don't lose the history of those who made it', the Patrick Chauvel Foundation

Today, press photos can inspire considerable speculative excitement on the art market, whilst at the same time, the major press organs are now abandoning their photo collections because they take up too much room. Between these two extremes are the figures who are the most directly concerned, the photo-reporters. Patrick Chauvel, who was born in 1949, has been an independent war photographer for over fifty years. He has decided to create a structure that will serve to safeguard and diffuse his own work which represents a heritage of considerable historic value, source material for research on nearly half a century of world history. The main challenge was to bring together skills from three different fields of expertise-the press, photography and archives-and to create a common language allowing for dialogue and understanding between them. The first step was simply to gather together the various documents (negatives, slides, traditional prints, objects, notebooks, press cuttings, films, digital files, etc.) which were to be found in several locations, in the collections of Corbis-Sygma and the newspaper France-Soir but also in the reporter's personal affairs. It was then necessary to sort these items by medium and by country, in order to respect the history of their production, and then to classify them by reportage. To create a certain coherence in the use and exploitation of the collection thus reconstituted, an overview was necessary to choose the emblematic pictures and the representative ones to digitise. An index was necessary too, to guide researches in this documentation covering world history. The structure created by the association for the Patrick Chauvel foundation hopes to inspire similar initiatives on the part of other photo-reporters and photojournalists, and to help preserve and render useful these collections which often represent a lifetime's work.