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The araGo Photography Portal

The French Ministry of Culture and Communication commissioned RMN-Grand Palais to create the araGo portal with the support of a scientific committee, as part of its photography mission. The project provides free online access to every collection of photography held in France.


The araGo Photography Portal aims to provide unprecedented access to the collections of France’s General Directorate for Cultural Heritage and the collections of the French Ministry of Culture and Communication’s public institutions, while gradually adding other public (public institutions and community collections) and private collections (associations, foundations, author funds and other collections). AraGo’s aim will be to identify relevant artwork and enable the follow-up. AraGo showcases all forms of photography, from its early days to the contemporary period, including all artists and collections.

François Arago (1786-1853), the Father of Photography

The photography portal’s name pays tribute to the French astronomer and political figure François Arago (1786-1853). In 1830, Arago presented Daguerre’s invention to the Academy of Sciences and Fine Arts and proposed that the government acquire the process so that it can symbolically offer it to the world.

Unexplored Riches

France, the cradle of invention, boasts a wealth of photographic collections that are preserved in archives, libraries and museums and by associations, foundations, companies, photographers and their beneficiaries. Not all of these collections are available online yet, and some have merely been identified.


The institutions depending on the Ministry of Culture and Communication that have put policies into place to digitise and share their works are listed in the “Collections” search engine, where their photographic collections can be found. However, without a tool specific to photography, searching for information about a photographic work can be an arduous and complicated task, with information often scattered across multiple structures. An example of this is the identification of prints that come from the same negative but are held by multiple owners.

Showcasing Photography

The mission of the RMN-Grand Palais photography agency is to showcase photography through the portal, from its early days to the modern day, as well as the authors and collections.

A true online museum, araGo combines educational purposes and relevance and encourages visitors to explore the history of photography through explanatory notes written especially for the site. These notes are accessible via an interactive catalogue.

An Interactive Platform

To continue identifying photography collections in France, collection owners are asked to contribute to the portal information by completing an online form to describe the works they owned, using Wikiconos, an interactive web 2.0 platform that enables external structures to write a note explaining the nature of their collections and shared photographers’ works.