Christie’s will offer the Collection Roger Therond, Une passion française in Paris in November 2026. The sale arrives as France marks the bicentenary of the birth of photography, and pays tribute to the man who championed the medium as an art form.
For more than half a century at the helm of Paris Match, Roger Therond shaped how France read the news image. Long kept private, his collection caused a sensation in 1999 at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, where a selection of 240 works was shown under the title Une passion française. Preserved by Therond’s family since his death in 2001, it comprises several hundred images and will be offered across three sessions.
Given the nickname “the Eye” for his instinct in spotting a striking photograph, Therond helped found and run one of the largest press groups in Europe alongside his friend Daniel Filipacchi. He published Henri Cartier-Bresson in the 1950s, and Sebastião Salgado and Helmut Newton from the 1980s onward. 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. In 2001 he received the Getty Images Lifetime Achievement Award.
From the late 1960s he gathered prints and, rarer still, complete albums of early photographs, roaming the Paris flea markets at dawn, visiting collectors such as Georges Sirot and André Duchesne, and attending public auctions. He described passing through “the three stages of the collector: the game, the hunt, and now serenity,” guided by a single measure: “what pleased me, surprised me or moved me.”
The collection spans a century of images, from the earliest daguerreotypes of the 1840s to the surrealist experiments of the interwar years, along two axes: the nineteenth century pioneers and the twentieth century avant-garde. It includes Gustave Le Gray’s seascapes made in Sète, Félix Teynard’s travels in the Orient, early snapshots by Jacques-Henri Lartigue, and works by Man Ray and Maurice Tabard, alongside Dora Maar, Florence Henri, Germaine Krull, Eugène Atget, Edouard Baldus, Charles Nègre, Guy Bourdin, Eli Lotar and Helmut Newton. Figures such as Victor Hugo, Jean-Paul Sartre and Peggy Guggenheim sometimes appear within it.
As early as 1985 the Musée d’ Orsay acquired works from the collection, among them a daguerreotype by Baron Gros depicting a bas-relief of the Acropolis in Athens. Elodie Morel-Bazin, Head of Photographs, Europe, at Christie’s, said the collection “offers an emotional journey through the history of photography” and noted that “never before has a collection of this calibre been presented in Paris.”
Further details will be released shortly. Works will be exhibited from 10 to 15 April at Christie’s in New York, from 30 June to 16 July at Christie’s in Paris and again from 7 to 13 November, and from 6 to 17 July in Arles at the Hôtel Nord-Pinus. Live sales are set for 13 and 14 November 2026, with an online sale from 6 to 17 November 2026.
(Press Release)
