[CLUB ALPIN FRANÇAIS] Section de l'Isère. Taillefer, Trièves, Dévoluy, Vercors

Rare album of original photographs issued in 1886 by the Isère Section of the Club alpin français and devoted to the Taillefer, Trièves, Dévoluy and Vercors regions. Copy no. 55, with the designation "Album n°1" on the title-page and the wet stamp "Club alpin français, section de l'Isère, Grenoble".

Contemporary chocolate-brown half shagreen with corners, spine with raised bands and the same gilt floral tool repeated three times, titles in gilt, red edges. Rubbing to headcaps, edges and corners. Several preliminary leaves provide a printed list of the views, followed by 50 card leaves mounted on guards, each bearing an original photograph measuring approximately 9.5 x 14 cm, individually numbered and captioned. The strongly contrasted prints are in very fine condition.

The place of this album within the publications of the Isère Section can now be reconstructed with some precision. A copy of the Oisans-Pelvoux album issued in 1880 retains the original prospectus and subscription terms for the collection: four sets of fifty photographs were planned, devoted respectively to Oisans-Pelvoux, Grandes-Rousses, Sept-Laux, Belledonne, Taillefer, Trièves, Dévoluy, Vercors, and Chartreuse. The projected order was not followed exactly in publication: Oisans-Pelvoux appeared in 1880, followed by Grandes-Rousses, Sept-Laux, Belledonne in 1883, Chartreuse in 1884, and the present album in 1886.

This reconstruction also helps to clarify - without fully explaining - the curious designation "Album n°1" on the present volume. The same wording occurs on known copies of Chartreuse and Oisans-Pelvoux, and therefore cannot indicate the position of a title within the overall series. No corresponding "Album n°2" has, to our knowledge, been identified; the safest course is consequently to retain the designation as printed without assigning it a meaning not supported by the surviving evidence.

The albums were produced in a manner closer to a hand-assembled photographic publication than to an ordinary printed book. The illustrations are not photomechanical reproductions printed with the text, but fifty actual photographic prints individually mounted on captioned cards. Another copy of this same 1886 album has been described as containing fifty albumen prints, as has a copy of the 1884 Chartreuse. The number 55 on the present copy also demonstrates that the subscription extended beyond the very small handful of copies that their present rarity might suggest, although the final number produced remains unknown.

Two albums from the series entered the French national collections at an early date. The Bibliothèque nationale de France preserves Grandes-Rousses, Sept-Laux, Belledonne of 1883 and Chartreuse of 1884, both presented by the Isère Section in 1886. Their arrival at the Bibliothèque nationale in the very year in which the present volume appeared suggests that the Section intended the albums not merely for circulation among members, but also for institutional preservation and wider scholarly use.

The photographic project belongs to the earliest years of the Grenoble section of the Club alpin français. Founded on 27 August 1874 around Henry Duhamel (1853-1917) and Charles Lory (1823-1889), the Section combined mountaineering from the outset with the systematic study of the surrounding ranges. Duhamel served as provisional president at its foundation and again as president from 1884 to 1887; Lory, Professor of Geology at Grenoble and a foundational figure in the geological study of the Dauphiné Alps, was its honorary president. Refuges, paths, bulletins, an alpine library and photographic collections all belonged to the same programme: not merely to climb the mountains, but to describe, map and make them known.

The present album extends this survey towards the southern and western parts of the Dauphiné. Its fifty photographs are by no means confined to summits. They record the Engins and Bourne gorges, roads and tunnels through the Vercors, Villard-de-Lans, Pont-en-Royans, the Grands Goulets, Châtillon-en-Diois, Lus-la-Croix-Haute, the Grand Ferrand, the Obiou and Mens. Another copy of the album preserves the same sequence, in which the eye moves naturally from the mountain landscape to the structures that were making it increasingly accessible.

The photograph of the suspension bridge at Brion is particularly characteristic. Built in 1854 high above the Ébron gorge, it connected the districts around Mens and Monestier-de-Clermont; elsewhere, the houses of Pont-en-Royans suspended above the Bourne record a mountain region that was not merely being climbed by a new generation of alpinists, but had long been inhabited, engineered and traversed.

The character of the album is inseparable from the period in which these images were assembled. During the decades following the invention of photography, the medium profoundly altered the visual understanding of the Alps: alongside landscapes long mediated through drawing and engraving came a means of recording with precision a rock face, glacier, road or village. For an alpine society whose founders included a topographer such as Duhamel and a geologist such as Lory, photography naturally occupied a place somewhere between the expedition and the survey.

A fine copy, numbered 55, of one of the four identified albums in this subscription series issued by the Isère Section, preserving all fifty original photographs with their captions, in its contemporary binding and with the Grenoble Section's own stamp on the title-page.