Finalement, qu'est-ce qu'une collection?

The Musée Réattu in Arles was among the first to collect photographs as art-works. This essay is one of a number in a volume commissioned to accompany an exhibtion that marked the fiftieth anniversary of that intitiative. Neither the intentions of the first curators nor the objects of the collection were made clear by policy. The collection developed in a way that is different to the collections of other similar institutions. In this historical study, Hodgson puts the collection of the Réattu museum into the context of other photographic collections around the world and sketches the outline of a classification of collection types.