The collection of slides contains 33 019 snaps taken between the end of the use of glass plates, namely the 1960’s and the 1990’s. One half was given by the lecturers and researchers affiliated to the Institute of Geography, the other originating from thematic collections published by editors.

     This collection covers the whole world and largely resumes the classification developed for glass plates. It is approximately composed of 12 225 slides on France, 5 625 on the rest of Europe, 4 558 on Africa, 4 752 on the Americas, 3 643 on Asia, 1 009 on the USSR, 716 on Oceania, 431 on the Arctic and 37 on Antarctica. Only the part of the collection of slides produced by the geographers will be gradually scanned and published online. It comprises photos of authors, students, lecturers or researchers that were taken during field missions in France or abroad, then selected with the photo librarian for their educational interest and minutely documented : actually, the collection was used by the lecturers to illustrate their courses. The snaps thus represent phenomena usually studied in physical or human geography, at least their spatial and visible expression. They often include detailed keys, are precisely located and nearly always dated, so they establish invaluable testimonies on certain parts of the world sometimes not photographed (islands, high mountains, polar regions), sometimes evolutionary (metropolises, deltas), or on the French regions, covering the second half of the XXth century. The whole collection is disparate : it can be either made out of one or two isolated photos representing a place or a phenomenon, or of a set including several dozens of images representing a city, a region at a given time. So, among these series stored in the photographic library, we can quote as an example : Belgium, the Netherlands and Scotland in the 1960s, (92 snaps), Turkey in 1978 (103 snaps), Oran in 1960 (22 snaps), Rangoon between 1980 and 1987 (42 snaps), Nepal between 1974 and 1977 (415 snaps), Victoria Island in 1986 (112 snaps), Togo in 1985 (15 snaps).

Contact at PRODIG : UMR8586.images.prodig@cnrs.fr