OTTAWA.- National Gallery of Canada Director and CEO, Marc Mayer, announced today the appointment of Luce Lebart, presently Director of Collections and Curator at the Société française de photographie (SFP) [French Society of Photography] in Paris, as the first Director of the Canadian Photography Institute of the National Gallery of Canada. In her new position, Ms. Lebart will be responsible for the Institute’s overall management, including its exhibitions and programs, physical, financial and human resources, and growth and development. She will assume her new role on August 29, 2016.

The establishment of the Canadian Photography Institute was announced in 2015 by the Gallery in conjunction with the National Gallery of Canada Foundation, and with the unprecedented support of both collector and philanthropist David Thomson, Chairman of Thomson Reuters Corporation and Founding Partner Scotiabank.

Over the past 50 years, the National Gallery of Canada has developed a rich and widely respected collection of photographs. Building on that foundation, the Institute will house one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of photographs and related materials, representing the entire history of the medium and revealing the most important stories of the modern era. With the mandate to offer an accessible collection, active program, research hub and digital portal for academic and public engagement, the Institute will become one of the finest resources for creative thinkers, scholars and anyone who has an interest in photography.

Last spring, the Institute held its first exhibition, Cutline: The Photography Archives of The Globe and Mail, in Toronto. Cutline will be on view in Ottawa from October 21, 2016 to February 12, 2017. Also this fall, visitors will have the opportunity to see more than 150 beautiful works by celebrated Czech photographer, Joseph Sudek, in the first major exhibition to situate the artist’s career within the rich artistic environment of Prague in the first part of the twentieth century. Josef Sudek (1896-1976): The World at my Window will be on view from October 28, 2016 to February 26, 2017 in a gallery space dedicated to the Canadian Photography Institute.

As Director of Collections and Curator at the Société française de photographie (SFP), Ms. Lebart is responsible for the management and conservation of collections, related communications, and the integration of these collections within the network of France’s Bibliothèque nationale de France (National Library) in order to increase their accessibility, while preserving their distinct character, integrity and independent management by SFP. Ms. Lebart has distinguished herself in her efforts to bring images out of storage and disseminate them more broadly, and to exhibit historical photography differently, in a new, more playful and engaging fashion, while furthering study of the collection and ensuring alignment with contemporary art practices and theory.

An historian of photography with degrees from Université Paris 1, Université Paris 8 and École nationale supérieure de la photographie in Arles, Ms. Lebart has worked on photographic collections in libraries, museums and archives. Her areas of research and publications are dedicated to scientific and documentary photography, notably the history of archiving and photographic techniques and processes. One of her most recent publications, Les Silences d’Atget, is an anthology of texts on the photographer Eugène Atget (Textuel, Paris, March, 2016).

In 2015, she organized a diverse range of exhibitions and published various works including Souvenirs du sphinx (Rencontres d’Arles); Tâches et Traces. Premiers essais photosensibles d’Hippolyte Bayard (Photaumnales, Beauvais); and Mold is Beautiful (Cosmos Arles Book, Poursuites). She also co-organized the exhibition Images à charge / A Burden of Proof which was shown at BAL in Paris, the Photographers’ Gallery in London, Camera in Turin, Italy, and now at Fotomuseum, Rotterdam, under the title of Crime Scenes | A Hundred Years of Photographic Evidence. More recently, she worked alongside Sam Stourdzé on the exhibition Lady Liberty, which is on view at the international festival Les Rencontres d’Arles 2016 this summer. In early September, her exhibition on the project Mold is Beautiful, will be on view at the GETXOPHOTO festival in Bilbao, Spain.