The photographer, author, and PhD in Art Sciences is an artist who works as a university professor of graphic design at Jianghan University in Wuhan, while also developing a creative activity as an artist-researcher. The originality of his practice lies in the way his research and investigation have fueled a profound reflection on the cities of his permanent residence—Bogota, Paris, and Wuhan—for decades, and materializes them in documentary forms through photography and publishing through the creation of his own publishing house, AEL Éditions.
Recently, his work has been the subject of several acquisitions for the permanent collections of major institutions in France, including the National Monuments of the Ministry of Culture and the Nicéphore Niépce Museum of Photography.
Ivan Segura Lara's work "Guérites de Surveillance de Bogota" (Surveillance Boxes of Bogota) joins the Musée Nicéphore Niépce in Chalon-sur-Saône
The Musée Nicephore Niépce de France was established in 1972 and is named after the inventor of photography in 1816. It boasts the most prestigious photographic collection in Europe, with a unique collection focusing on the origins of the photographic image. The museum permanently offers temporary exhibitions of historic and contemporary photographs.
It is in this historical setting that the work of Ivan Segura Lara, a Franco-Colombian author born in Bogota, has just been acquired for the series "Guérites de Surveillance de Bogota" (Surveillance Boxes of Bogota), enriching the collection with nearly 3 million pieces. Created in 1992, the originality of the author's approach lies in its seriality, with production using a reportage camera, the analog Nikon FM2, whose color negatives were most often developed by the author himself.
It is the small format of the postcard print that gave the series its originality and character as a unique photographic object.
This reportage, whose anthropological value and source for the study of the urban landscape, also has historical value. Indeed, following various territorial planning schemes, these buildings disappeared from the streets and no longer offer this picturesque character to the city, which has become a cosmopolitan and disproportionate city. This archive document, therefore, becomes a historical document for researchers and art lovers, whose relevance the Musée Nicéphore Niépce, through its Collections Director, Sylvain Besson, has found as an object of photography history, worthy of this noble museum that honors the memory of the inventor of photography.
