PARIS.- Christie's presents the sale of the Collection Roger Therond, Une passion française, to be held in Paris in September 2026. At a time when France is celebrating the bicentenary of the birth of photography, this sale stands as one of the most anticipated events in the photography world — and a vibrant tribute to the man who, better than anyone, championed the nobility of the medium.

For more than half a century at the helm of Paris Match, Roger Therond taught France how to look — how to feel the shock of an image. But behind the public figure, the legendary director, there was another man: a solitary hunter, a passionate lover, a collector of a rare kind. It is this man that Christie's reveals today.

Long kept secret, the collection caused a sensation in 1999 at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, where a selection of 240 works was unveiled for the first time under the title Une passion française. Preserved away from the public eye by Roger Therond's family since his passing in 2001, the collection has lost none of its mythical aura; the few loans of works by Le Gray or Dora Maar have only amplified it.
Comprising several hundred images, the collection will be offered across three sessions. The sale presents an unprecedented group of masterpieces of nineteenth- and twentieth‑century French photography.

Roger Therond : “the eye, the hunt, the serenity”

For more than fifty years, at the head of the editorial direction of Paris Match, from his office overlooking the Champs-Élysées, he shaped a new way of telling the world. Images no longer illustrated events: they revealed them, fixed them, etched them into the collective memory. His eye was feared, admired, and sought after. Very quickly, he was given the nickname “the Eye,” in recognition of his exceptional intuition for spotting the most striking photographs.

Together with his friend Daniel Filipacchi, he helped found and run the largest press group in Europe. His flagship, Paris Match, to which he gave the famous slogan “the weight of words, the shock of photos”, left a profound mark on popular culture, defining an entire era. He published Henri Cartier-Bresson in the 1950s, and Sebastião Salgado or Helmut Newton from the 1980s onward. The man who sifted through, examined, and cropped tens of thousands of photographs had one unwavering rule: “the most important photos must reach Paris Match first and land on my desk…”

The first edition of the Month of Photography in 1980 and the creation of the Visa pour l'Image festival in 1989 are also part of his legacy. By forging lasting ties with artistic and cultural circles, he explored every field, from fashion photography to fine art photography, and of course photojournalism.

Among the first to understand and collect photography as an art form in its own right, Roger Therond leaves the world a visual memory without equal. CartierBresson, Helmut Newton and Irving Penn all saw in him a singular eye and a unique sensibility. As a testament to this international recognition, the International Center of Photography in New York honored him “for having shaped photojournalism in Europe”, and in 2001 he received the Getty Images Lifetime Achievement Award.

But it was in secrecy that he built his masterpiece. From the late 1960s onward, he began gathering prints and, even rarer still, complete albums of early photographs, the most precious treasures of nineteenthcentury photographic history — roaming with a flashlight through the Paris flea markets at dawn, searching in bookshops, visiting major collectors such as Georges Sirot and André Duchesne, consulting leading international dealers, or attending prestigious public auctions. He himself confided that he had “passed through the three stages of the collector: the game, the hunt, and now serenity.” A serenity earned over thirty years of pursuit, guided by a single compass: “what pleased me, surprised me or moved me.” And he added, with the tenderness of true lovers: “I love touching an early photograph. The calotype with its haze, the salted paper with its rough texture, have charms that delight the fingertips.”

Three auctions for one of the most important collections in the world

What Christie's offers today is a complete journey through a century of images. From the earliest daguerreotypes of the 1840s to the surrealist experiments of the interwar years, the collection unfolds as a free, exacting and deeply personal exploration. It embraces two major axes: the nineteenth century pioneers and the twentieth century avantgarde. Here we find Gustave Le Gray's seascapes made in Sète — an intimate homage to his native city — Félix Teynard's travels in the Orient, the first snapshots by Jacques-Henri Lartigue — whom Therond called “the blissful one” — the experiments of Man Ray — “the frenetic” — and the investigations of Maurice Tabard — “the secretive”. Alongside Dora Maar, Florence Henri, Germaine Krull, Eugène Atget, Edouard Baldus, Charles Nègre, Guy Bourdin, Eli Lotar and Helmut Newton, the collection forms a visual memory unlike any other, where Victor Hugo, Jean-Paul Sartre or Peggy Guggenheim sometimes unexpectedly appear.

A testament to its historical importance: as early as 1985, the Musée d'Orsay acquired exceptional works from the collection, among them the daguerreotype by Baron Gros depicting a bas-relief of the Acropolis in Athens. Since then, the landmark sale of the André Jammes collection in London in 1999 set new records for historical photography. The dispersal of the Therond Collection follows in this tradition — and surpasses it.

“This collection offers an emotional journey through the history of photography, an invitation to rediscover it in all its richness, depth and beauty, through a unique, passionate and deeply felt vision. Never before has a collection of this calibre been presented in Paris. It speaks to all collectors, far beyond the field of photography alone. It reveals the pioneers of an era, the earliest images, the founding gestures. It reminds us how a collection can embody a vision, define a time, and transmit a way of seeing” comments Elodie Morel-Bazin, Head of Photographs, Europe, Christie's.