Exhibitions / Normandie dans l’oeil des photographes des chantiers navals et Roger Schall
Normandie dans l’oeil des photographes des chantiers navals et Roger Schall
Écomusée & Escal’Atlantic, Saint-Nazaire
4 July 2026 – 19 September 2027
Bringing together the photographic archives of the Penhoët shipyards and Roger Schall’s extensive reportage, Normandie dans l’œil des photographes examines how photography transformed the liner from an industrial achievement into one of the defining visual icons of the twentieth century. Presented in Saint-Nazaire, where Normandie was built, the exhibition establishes a dialogue between two distinct perspectives on the ship and its emergence into modern history.
Presented at Escal’Atlantic and the Écomusée de Saint-Nazaire, the exhibition was conceived through a joint curatorship involving Saint-Nazaire Agglomération Tourisme, historian Adrien Motel and Schall Collection. Anonymous photographs produced at the Penhoët shipyards between 1931 and 1935 are placed in dialogue with Schall’s reportages from 1934 to 1937, revealing how industrial documentation and the illustrated press jointly shaped the liner’s public image.
Nearly 900 of the 80,000 images preserved by Schall Collection are devoted to Normandie. Within Escal’Atlantic, the monumental scenography opens a symbolic space inside the permanent exhibition, with the ship’s bow serving as the point of convergence between the two photographic approaches. The shipyard archives form a precise chronicle of construction, while Schall’s photographs—commissioned by Lucien Vogel for Vu and later by the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique—trace the liner’s transformation into a defining image of French modernity.
For Roger Schall, this institutional exhibition in the city where Normandie was built marks a further milestone in the Estate’s work to restore his place in photographic history. By bringing this major body of work into dialogue with the collections of Saint-Nazaire’s museums, it establishes the photographs as essential documents of French industry, maritime heritage and the visual culture of the 1930s.