Ever since photography was invented, photographers have hoped to "paint with light". This idea forms the common thread running through the exhibition, with a dialogue between heritage images and contemporary works that mutually evoke the question of colour in photography.

Selected from the collections of the Société française de photographie, the historical photographs retrace the history of the conquest of colour through a variety of processes. At the end of the 19th century, this research echoed the Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist movements, both in terms of its scientific foundations and its desire to recreate a sensitive experience of colour as a manifestation of light.
Since the turn of the millennium, certain photographic practices have given new forms to this exploration. By proposing a series of intersections, the exhibition brings to light similarities of intention and shared imaginations around the idea of photographic recording of colour in its intimate connection with the action of light. In so doing, the relationship between science and art, abstraction and figuration, is called into question. By bringing together images that are more than a century apart, the exhibition invites us to discover how the invention of colour in photography resonates in contemporary artistic creation.