"The Investigation That Went Viral"
Luce LEBART
The Classic #14
automne 2025
While some photographers are identified through the dogged work of a single researcher, there are cases that rely on groups, even strangers, to come together to solve mysteries, as Luce Lebart relates in the following story. At the time, she was Director of the collection at Société française de Photographie (SFP). She is now a curator and an artistic director working as a French correspondent for The Archive of Modern Conflict.
“The trail of the unknown photographer has been found.” On 19 April 2013, the headline of the French newspaper Le Parisien announced that the conclusion of its springtime serial had been reached, following the participatory and spontaneous identification of an anonymous, previously unknown photographer. Anonymous because none of his images were signed; unknown because his amateur practice had remained entirely private.
Like many beautiful stories, this one began with an encounter: at a party where I met a photographer. I was a history student, carrying out a civic service placement at the Société française de photographie (SFP) in Paris, the world’s oldest photographic society, still active today, with a collection listed as a national monument. I spoke of my work cataloguing images, preparing them for digitisation, and assisting with exhibition projects. The photographer, him- self involved in heritage inventory work, casually mentioned a collection of glass plates, produced circa 1900, that had been “sleeping” in his attic for years. I pointed out that the SFP’s holdings had been built up primarily through donations since its founding in 1854. The photographer immediately grasped the value of entrusting the plates to the society: “The plates are small, but they’re beautiful, both technically and aesthetically. The problem is, we don’t know who the photographer was.”
Monday, March 4, 2013. 9:00 a.m. 71 rue de Richelieu, Paris. At the (then) headquarters of the SFP, volunteers began opening the boxes with the plates that had just been delivered. The photographer recounted their origins, his testimony recorded: They were found in 1999 on the Saclay plateau, in the Essonne department, formerly Seine-et-Oise, next to a dumpster near the village of Villiers-le-Bâcle. “Some passersby who were interested in bric-a-brac came across these boxes of glass-plate photographs.
The small glass negatives had been stored in card- board Lumière boxes, themselves tucked inside old metal biscuit tins. It was these vintage tins, gleaming white and charming in their way, that first caught the eye of the passersby.” They entrusted the photo- graphic contents to the photographer, who decided to donate all 1120 glass plates to the SFP.
The fact that these images had been cast aside, escaping the garbage heap by mere chance, lent enormous weight to the media coverage of the identification project that was to follow. The case of the “1900 plates” was immediately framed as a “rescue”.
To identify the photographer was to grant him the recognition and visibility he had nearly lost, to save him from oblivion, just as the plates themselves had been saved from destruction, stirring a flood of emotions. After all, the common fate of amateur family photographs is everyone’s fate: to be scattered, for- gotten, and to turn to dust. Restoring value to these images and their story meant restoring our ties to the past, to those we have loved, who came before us, and who inevitably fade from memory after a few generations.
The process of identifying the photographer started with a post on the SFP’s Facebook page and that launched a spontaneous, crowdsourced investigation. The Facebook post announced the arrival of 1000 “1900 plates” salvaged from a dumpster, depicting scenes in the Essonne. And then the whole thing went viral on social media. The very next morning, Julien Heyligen, a journalist from Le Parisien’s Essonne pages, visited the SFP and published a call for information: “He was a château owner in Essonne at the start of the 20th century, a great traveller, and completely doting on his daughter.
That’s all we know. His name remains a mystery.” The article spread quickly online, shared by the vast genealogical community of Geneanet, then circulating via “Les Archiveilleurs” and other mailing lists. Replies from genealogists poured in, while Le Parisien’s reporter pursued leads in Villiers-le-Bâcle, the town- ship where many of the photos had been taken, and ultimately discarded.
Identification was aided by period metadata. Each small Lumière cardboard box, named after the manufacturer of the instant gelatin-silver dry plates, bore hand- written notes, almost certainly by the photographer himself. Most often, they listed the first names of two children who frequently appeared: “Marie Louise” and “Paul.” Dates were given, as well as country names, and one recurring word: Biver. Since “Biver” did not match any local place name, it could well have been the children’s surname, and thus the photographer’s own. Genealogists confirmed it. A follow-up article in Le Parisien stated: “The little Marie-Louise Biver has been identified online via the Geneanet website.” The photographer, it turned out, was her father: Count Eugène Théophile Biver. Born in 1861, Biver came from high society. An engi- neer by training, he worked in a range of fields, from mining to maritime transport to locomotive construction. He produced these 1120 photographs between 1895 and 1905. He and his wife had three children: Marie-Louise (b. 1896), Paul (b. 1886), and finally Marie-Hélène (b. 1909) who lived in the family château at Villiers-le-Bâcle until her death in 1985. Count Biver served as the town’s mayor, travelled widely, and died in 1929.
Genealogists fleshed out the Biver family tree and searched for surviving descendants. Meanwhile, Le Parisien’s reporter confirmed that the château most often depicted in the plates was indeed Villiers-le- Bâcle’s château, since 1995 owned and restored by the impressionist Yves Lecoq, who opens it to visitors in summer. Local testimonies revealed that “almost the whole village once belonged to the Biver family”, as recalled by Gilbert Lannois, born there in 1934.
An obituary in the Revue de la métallurgie described Biver as a mayor of “profound affability and extreme kindness” who “did much good”.
As the story spread across digital magazines, the press, and eventually television, it became clear that the value of these 1120 glass plates far surpassed the history of one family. The photographs not only documented the château around which Villiers- le-Bâcle grew, but also the wider Essonne region around 1900. They showed harvests, haymaking, potato gathering, beet hoeing, village parades, and fêtes. They revealed the everyday life of an afflu- ent family; hunts, picnics, interior views, while also preserving rare documentation of a rural depart- ment, then known as Seine-et-Oise, once among the poorest in France and poorly represented in photographic archives.
For historians, the Biver collection is above all a striking example of early amateur use of instant photographic processes. The Count experimented widely: capturing objects in flight, in motion, in mid-fall; producing short-interval image sequences; recording local agricultural labour on the Saclay plateau. He looked with care and consideration at itinerant communities, photographing travellers along village paths.
One remarkable image shows a Romani family walk- ing joyfully toward the camera, smiling, breath- ing freedom. Taken twelve years before nomadic groups were subjected to systematic police photo- graphing and stigmatisation, and sixty-eight years before Chagall’s famous painting Les gens du voyage, it shares their imagery of dignity and lightness.
Decades later, Josef Koudelka would cast a similar empathetic gaze on these communities. Biver clearly delighted in photography. That pleasure is shared today, barely in time.
The SFP organised a first exhibition of the Count Eugène Biver’s images during the European Heritage Days, displayed outdoors beside the dumpsters where the plates had once been found. The pho- tograph of the Romani family became the poster image, later featured on the catalogue of Mondes Tziganes at the Musée de l’histoire de l’Immigra- tion in 2018. The Essonne departmental archives and the Domaine de Chamarande also honoured the collection through exhibitions. Biver’s images of agricultural practices have since been used for documentation, contributing to the classification of sites and raising awareness of local history. Through a remarkable chain of chance encounters, these cen- tury-old images, rescued from a trash heap, jour- neyed from château life to the climate-controlled reserves of France’s national photographic herit- age. And their author, Count Eugène Biver, finally stepped out of the shadows.
Luce Lebart