Catarina Simão and Marta Jecu: Let us start by talking about the history and the content of the photographic collection, about how you concretely worked with these images, and about how they are stored and organised? What is the history of the Quai Branly photographic archives passing through various French institutions?

Christine Barthe: Before working at the Musée du Quai Branly, from its foundation in 2006, I worked at Musée de L’Homme from 1992, and participated in the transfer of the photographic collections from one museum to the other. The phototheque of the Musée de L’Homme had an important collection of photographs especially rich in the early years of photography from 1840 to 1870, inherited from the National Museum for Natural History. The phototheque created and preserved the system for organising the material from the opening of the museum in 1937-1938, and continued to accumulate (without materials) using the same principles in a more or less organised way. This phototheque was in fact a commercial agency (in existence since 1938) – a place where one could consult and order reproductions of photographs. In 1992, there were some projects initiated by the Ministry of Culture to finance the restoration of these images, as the Musée de L’Homme was part of the Ministry of National Education. The historic collection of images was indeed very important (with more than 600 000 photographs), but the conditions for conservation and security were catastrophic and we invested our work mainly in these conservation and security emergencies over a period of several years.