| Summary: | Roger-Viollet is a well-known French photo agency that was founded in 1938 by Hélène Roger and Jean Fischer. The agency set up in the premises of Laurent Ollivier, an ‘image merchant’ who was well known from the 1880s on. The sixth-arrondissement address in Paris placed it in an environment close to its potential clients amongst students, artists, magazines, publishing houses and so on. The agency was closed during the Second World War but opened again in 1944, when the couple undertook a purchasing policy: collections of photo agencies, of professional or amateur photographers, illustrated magazines, graphic arts, rare books… Their aim was to be able to reply to the needs of any picture researcher. As the daughter of her photographer-father, Hélène Roger was particularly sensitive to questions to do with copyright. She consequently decided that the photographic prints would be lent to clients and only the reproduction rights would be sold, the prices fixed according to the usage and diffusion of the picture. The photos were organised without the use of a thesaurus but in an efficient way that was inspired by intellectual and commercial logics. The collections evolved in an organic way, following the changing requirements of professional picture researchers. For a time, the Roger-Viollet agency was clearly a precursor amongst such agencies on account of the digitisation of its images, undertaken with remarkable efficiency. In order to understand such agencies and to guarantee their lasting usefulness, it is vital to conserve all the archival elements, however varied, respecting the order of what constituted the agency’s economic activity, its practices and usages, its changes over time, its contacts and contracts with other actors in the field, the works produced, their supporting documents… Anything can contribute to understanding the whole picture and seeing what made this activity such lucrative business.
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