ABSTRACT
The idea of starting a national museum for the exclusive display of photography in France from 1840 to 1940 originally was driven by wonder, but soon became an insurmountable challenge. It is a history-writing project with inversed values, in which the undone takes the place of the done. The national museum of French photography that never was occupies a discursive space far from the tangibly rooted histories of institutions. This chapter not aspires to exhaustively narrate this remarkable adventure through the lens of our present experience of virtual collections, but rather try to lay an analytical eye on its failure to establish itself permanently. In this chapter, the author lays out the reasons, circumstances, and steps that led to this photographic flop, or this institutional failure to turn the Museum of Documentary Photographs into an enduring institution. It gives historic roots to what has been known since the 2000s as a fascination for the Camera as historian.
