In 2023, the museum acquired an exceptional ensemble of photographs, the first images made in French Polynesia between 1859 and 1870. They are the work of two naval officers, Gustave Viaud and Paul Émile Miot, whose complementary approaches offer a rare testimony to a territory still very little photographed at the time.
The paper negatives by Gustave Viaud, produced between 1859 and 1862, constitute an unpublished body of work, long kept within the Loti Viaud family and then by a private collector. The elder brother of Pierre Loti, Viaud played a major role in the birth of the writer's taste for elsewhere, but he was also a discreet pioneer of photography. Settled in Tahiti as a naval surgeon, he quickly experimented with this new medium. His images, somewhere between controlled landscapes, familiar topographical scenes and subtle effects of the wind on vegetation, reveal a genuine sense of composition. In 1859 he also made a remarkable portrait of Teriimaevarua II, queen of Bora Bora.
Ten years later, Paul Émile Miot, an officer already recognised as an accomplished photographer, stayed in Tahiti and the Marquesas. Using the collodion glass negative, he captured coasts, landscapes and faces of Polynesian society, notably the royal family. His precise, almost modern gaze gives his compositions a singular force.
Together, these two series form a striking visual material, predating the massive development of photography in these archipelagos. The exhibition aims to highlight the graphic beauty of the negatives, while also presenting enlargements, positives and early prints. The images by Viaud, almost entirely unpublished, and those by Miot, never before shown in a dedicated exhibition, enter into dialogue for the first time within a single itinerary.