Fannie Escoulen will leave her position as head of photography at the Ministry of Culture at the end of September to lead the prefiguration of the future Cité de l’image photographique in Chalon-sur-Saône in the city’s former hospital built on Île Saint-Laurent. She will work on this project in conjunction with Brigitte Maurice-Chabard, director of the Musée Nicéphore Niépce, and her team.
The move of this municipal museum dedicated to photography to the city’s former hospital, built on Saint-Laurent Island, had been considered by the municipality in 2016 when the building was purchased by the city, the agglomeration, the region and the state for 12 million euros. Since then, the project to redeploy the museum in a Cité de l’image photographique had been bogged down.
Former hospital of Châlons-sur-Saône located on Saint-Laurent Island.
The content of the project must however be validated by the communities and the State as well as the financing of its installation and its operation on the site of the former hospital which will have to be renovated.
One of the priorities of the project is the creation of a new conservation centre for the collections of the Musée Nicéphore Niépce, taking into account their continued enrichment and the establishment’s place at the national level in the conservation, treatment and promotion of funds from photographers, deceased or contemporary, increasingly numerous to be deposited, bequeathed or donated to the museum.
No opening date has yet been set. In any case, it will not be for the celebration of the bicentenary of the invention of photography in 2026-2027.
Head of Photography within the General Directorate of Artistic Creation since September 2021, Fannie Escoulen is therefore leaving the Ministry of Culture to lead a project that combines both the photographic heritage with which her functions at the ministry have familiarized her, and the creation as well as the developments of the uses and practices of the medium in which she has always been interested throughout her professional career.
A graduate of the École nationale supérieure de la photographie d’Arles, Fannie Escoulen, born in 1978 in Valence, was notably deputy director of the Bal, from 2007 to 2014, before becoming an independent exhibition curator including the monograph Laurence Aëgerter in 2020-2021 at the Petit Palais.
