BY Sara Angel

Sophie Hackett, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s assistant curator of photography, did
n’t have high hopes when she asked her summer intern, Vanessa Fleet, to help her d
etermine the creator of a collection of French photographs. “It’s the stuff of caree
rs to figure out who did something, to answer the question, ‘Who created an unknow
n work of art?’” says Hackett. “It’s a dream to have somebody pin down an attribution.”
This makes the mystery that Fleet solved last summer, in under three months, all
the more extraordinary. It is also one of the many good reasons to see the poig
nantly beautiful AGO exhibition opening this week, which sprung from Fleet’s find:
“Where I Was Born…: A Photograph, a Clue, and the Discovery of Abel Boulineau.”
Last May, Fleet, a master’s student in the University of Toronto’s museum studies pr
ogram, began to investigate a collection of 1,702 photographs that the AGO acqui
red in 2005 from an anonymous donor. For five years the photographs sat in the g
allery’s vault, slipped into clear plastic album sleeves in 10 large burgundy stor
age binders, as Hackett and her colleagues ruminated about what to do with the p
ictures. From the moment Hackett first saw the collection’s “incredibly well-preserv
ed” photographs of pre-industrial rural life in France from 1897 to 1916, she knew
they were remarkable. But, she says, since the images were un-attributed, “more r
esearch and cataloguing had to be done before we could exhibit or publish them.”
Made during a time when European cities were becoming increasingly modernized, t
he photographs include a wide range of everyday subjects—children, animals, potter
s, people out for a Sunday stroll, local produce sales and espadrille makers. “The
y represent a time and place that we don’t see so much,” says Hackett. “Most turn-of-t
he-20th-century photographs tend to be city images and studio portraits—works that
people paid to have made. There is little available of people photographed outs
ide in an informal way.”
Hackett was also drawn to the collection because of the photographer’s talent and
technique. “In each of these five- by-seven-inch pictures there’s a lot going on vis
ually,” she says. “A great deal of information is corralled into them. Yet they real
ly come together as gem-like compositions.”
Hackett asked Fleet to work on the collection because the student can read Frenc
h, and had written an essay on French photographer Eugène Atget. “I knew she knew ab
out France at the turn of the century,” says Hackett.
Fleet began her exploration of the works by carefully studying the photographs’ re
verse sides. There, on many of them, always annotated in the same tiny handwriti
ng, she found peoples’ names and often addresses, as well as the names of all the
towns, landmarks, mountains, lakes and rivers that the photographer visited. “The
collection is like a diary of the places he saw and the people he met over a 19-
year period,” says Fleet.
On the back of one of the photographs—a shot of two women walking down a shady pat
h—were words that struck Fleet: “Auberive–l’Avenue de l’Abbatiale–où je suis né, le 16 mars
(“Auberive–Abbatiale Avenue, where I was born on March 16, 1839”). Not only did the ph
rase offer the name of a street, town and birthdate, it was a rare first-person
inscription.
The first thing Fleet did with this information was to rule out a photographer n
amed Émile Fréchon, who also took pictures of the French countryside and who some be
lieved was the possible creator of the collection. Since he was born in 1848, he
couldn’t have been its author.
Then Fleet contacted the French parish responsible for the records of Auberive a
nd discovered that in 1839, on the 17th of March, there was a single entry regar
ding a birth the previous day. It was for a baby boy listed as “Boulineau, Abel-Ma
rie Nicolas.”
Using Google, Fleet discovered that Abel Boulineau had been a recognized Paris-b
ased painter, who taught art at one of the city’s well-known colleges and whose pa
inting can be found online because his work is still traded at auctions.
Still, there was nothing to connect the name Abel Boulineau to photography, and
no smoking gun to attach his name to the AGO collection.
Not until Fleet was nearing the end of her internship did she come upon a pictur
e that made her stop in her tracks. While going through a final binder, she look
ed at an image of four women, surrounded by young children, washing clothes alon
g a river in front of a laundry line. “It felt very familiar,” says Fleet, describin
g the moment when she realized that the photograph was almost identical to a pai
nting by Boulineau called “The Washerwomen”—an image she had seen almost two months ea
rlier on the web.
The Washerwomen
Dinan: Wash house on the Rance River (around 1898)
“It was pretty convincing,” says Hackett. “This was the final key that unlocked the my
stery of the pictures’ attribution.”
Were it not for Fleet’s find, the collection would eventually have gone on show as
a notable documentation of French country life. But Fleet’s research situates the
images in an entirely new light. Boulineau can now be included as part of a gro
up of 19th-century painters—including such greats as Edgar Degas—who turned to the n
ew art form of photography to create source material for their paintings.
“It signals to me how much work there is still to be done in the history of photog
raphy,” says Hackett. She also acknowledges that with the right intern, “it’s clear wh
at can get accomplished.”