Voir Tahiti - Premières photographies 1859-1870

Two gazes, a decade apart: the first photographs of French Polynesia resurface, signed by an obscure naval surgeon and a recognized photographer. A photographic rediscovery at the Musée du Quai Branly Jacques Chirac.

In 2023, the museum acquired a set of photographs, the earliest images taken 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 of a territory still scarcely photographed at the time.

The paper negatives of Gustave Viaud, produced between 1859 and 1862, constitute a corpus long-preserved in the Loti–Viaud family and later by a private collector. Elder brother of Pierre Loti, Viaud played a role in the birth of the writer's taste for distant lands, but he was also a discreet pioneer of photography. Based in Tahiti as a naval surgeon, he quickly experimented with this new medium. His images, balancing controlled landscapes, familiar topographic scenes, and the effects of the wind on vegetation, reveal a sense of composition. He also produced in 1859 a portrait of Teriimaevarua II, queen of Bora Bora.

Ten years later, Paul Émile Miot, an officer already recognized as an accomplished photographer, stayed in Tahiti and the Marquesas. Using a collodion-on-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 strength.

Together, these two series form a visual material predating the mass development of photography in these archipelagos. The exhibition Voir Tahiti — Early Photographs 1859–1870, presented at the Musée du Quai Branly Jacques Chirac from September 29, 2026, aims to highlight the graphic beauty of the negatives, while presenting enlargements, positive prints and vintage prints. The Viaud images, almost entirely unpublished, and Miot's, never shown in a dedicated exhibition to date, dialogue for the first time in a single cohesive presentation.