Yerres, France — it is one of the great collections of photography. A collection that is a work of art in and of itself. It is a collection that revolves solely around what pictures the collectors loved. There are the portraits, the compositions, the street scenes and the children. Some of the best known photographers in the world are included in the collection as are some that are less well known or known not at all. There is the famous photo of Henri Matisse in Nice with his birds by Henri Cartier-Bresson and, too, Our Lady of the Iguanas by the Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide, an uncanny shot of an anonymous Mexican woman with a head full of live iguanas. These are photographs with a presence about them. These are the treasures of a husband and wife passionate about photography. And an eclectic and aesthetic selection of photographs from this singular American collection, brought together by Sondra Gilman and her husband Celso Gonzalez-Falla, is currently on display at the Maison Caillebotte in the bucolic Parisian suburb of Yerres.

The show, entitled Presences, Photographic Treasures from the Gilman and Gonzalez-Falla Collections features some of the greatest names in 19th and 20th century photography: Berenice Abbot, Edward Steichen, Garry Winogrand. The list is endless but there are many lesser known photographers represented in the collection that was brought together by Sondra Gilman and her husband Celso Gonzalez-Falla. Some 140 photographs by 91 artists, including 24 women, are on display and the vast majority are original prints. « A demanding collection in terms of the choice of works: they gave preference to the strength of a work over the fame of an artist, although the young talents they discovered then are today, the greatest artists of their generation, and the collection includes the most important names of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, » commented Valérie Dupont-Aignan, the curator of the exhibition and the director of the Maison Caillebotte. Valérie Dupont-Aignan selected the photographs for the exhibition from a collection of over 7,000 pictures. The show is arranged thematically and chronologically with portraits, compositions, street life, children and an intriguing section devoted to America. Solitude, too, is a theme on hand in the show.

Sondra Gilman began the collection in 1975 with her first husband Charles Gilman Jr, for the Gilman Paper Company’s collection. Sondra and Celso Gonzalez-Falla married in 1986 (Mr. Gilman passed away in 1982), and the collection continued to grow. Sondra passed away in 2021 and Mr. Gonzalez-Falla was present at the inauguration of the exhibition in France. « How did we collect? We had to agree on a photo before purchasing it. Maybe we had different reasons. Sondra had to love it. For her it was a visceral reaction. Her stomach had to turn. I had to love it perhaps because of its composition, color, and the quality of the print. We always saw a photo three times before we bought it, and we tried to buy vintage prints. We never used an outside curator. We bought what we loved, » explains Mr. Gonzalez-Falla in the beautifully appointed catalogue to the exhibition.

The exhibition is on until November 17th but the Maison Caillebotte is worth a visit in and of itself. The home, where the Caillebotte family lived from 1860 until 1879, has been meticulously restored and is surrounded by a vast park to explore replete with a chapel, Swiss chalet and an ice house and much more. You can even get into Caillebotte leisure activities and rent a small boat, until the end of October, to go boating on the Yerres like the Caillebotte family did over 150 years ago. We can also highly recommend the restaurant on the premises. ©Trish Valicenti for The Gourmet Gazette. https://www.maisoncaillebotte.fr/