The name on the door at 9 Rue Cadet

Chevojon is not a brand name. It is the name on a wooden sign at 9 Rue Cadet, in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, and it has been there longer than anyone currently alive.

A studio bought, not founded

In 1861 Louis-Émile Durandelle and Hyacinthe-César Delmaet opened a photography studio in Paris built for a specific job: architecture and industry. Not portraits. Buildings, and the machinery that made them. They spent over a decade documenting the Paris Opéra going up floor by floor — long exposures on glass plates, commissioned by the architects and engineers who were building the city.

My great-great-grandfather, Paul-Joseph-Albert Chevojon, joined that studio as an operator. Not an owner. He learned to see through someone else's lens before he had one of his own, which I think is the only order it ever really works in.

In 1886 he bought the studio outright. The equipment, the premises, and roughly ten thousand glass plates.

The sign nobody took down

The building on Rue Cadet still carries a wooden sign reading Photo Industrielle. When the building was renovated years later, the architect refused to remove it.

I find that detail more instructive than any of the famous negatives. Somebody who had no family connection to the name looked at a piece of painted wood advertising a photographic service that no longer existed, and decided it had earned the right to stay. That is roughly what an archive is: the things a stranger decides not to throw away.

Working while it happens

In January 1910 the Seine broke its banks and half of Paris went under. Paul-Joseph-Albert walked into the flooded streets with a camera and worked the way Durandelle had taught the studio to work — one negative at a time, while it was still happening, with no idea which frame would matter later.

The archive was building on itself. His sons ran the studio after him, then his grandson — my grandfather, Bernard Chevojon, who holds the archive today.

What actually carries over

It would be easy, and slightly dishonest, to claim a straight line from glass plates to a drone. The equipment has nothing in common. Neither does the commission: nobody is paying me to document a building going up.

What carries over is narrower than that, and it is three things.

Record before composition. The studio's job was to describe a thing accurately, and the beauty was a by-product of describing it well. I shoot the same way. Onde o Rio Encontra o Mar is not a composed image; it is an accurate one. Two rivers refusing to mix, photographed from the only position where that is visible.

The position nobody else takes. Durandelle photographed the Opéra from the scaffolding because that is where the information was. An aerial camera is the same instrument of access. Corumbau's sandbar is a shape that exists only from directly overhead; from the beach it is nothing at all.

Work that is made to outlast the maker. Those plates were exposed by people who assumed somebody would be looking at them in a century, and were right. That assumption changes what you make. It is why every print here is on archival paper rather than whatever is cheapest, and why the file behind each one is large enough to print again at any size, long after I have stopped.

Why the name is on the prints

I use Chevojon rather than my legal surname because it is the accurate one for this work. It is not a profession I picked. It is something I carry, and the honest version of that is to say so plainly rather than to imply I invented a practice that predates me by five generations.

The archive itself is my grandfather's, not mine, and it is not what this shop sells. What is here is my own work — coastlines, aerials, the places I have actually flown — made with the habits that came down the line with the name.

More on how that work gets made in Perspective.