Luce Lebart, 45, currently director of collections and curator at the Paris-based Société française de photographie, officially assumes the CPI directorship Aug. 29.The Canadian Press
The new Canadian Photography Institute of the National Gallery of Canada, its creation announced with great fanfare last November, is set to open to the public this fall with a French photography expert at its helm. Luce Lebart, 45, currently director of collections and curator at the Paris-based Société française de photographie, officially assumes the CPI directorship Aug. 29. From that perch, she'll oversee the installation of the institute's first two exhibitions, Cutline: The Photography Archives of The Globe & Mail and Josef Sudek (1896-1976): The World at my Window, opening, respectively, Oct. 21 and Oct. 28. The CPI represents a great coming together of photographic resources. Not only does the institute, financed in part by Scotiabank, include more than 50,000 prints and 145,000 negatives from the NGC's existing holdings and those of the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography (which upon its closing in 2009 was amalgamated with the NGC), it's going to be – and in some respects already is – the recipient of tens of thousands of images donated by prominent Toronto art collector David Thomson, chair of Thomson Reuters Corp. and The Globe & Mail. The hope here, of course, is to encourage other major donations and to make the CPI one of the world's great centres of photographic study and display.