Musiques en Aix: a century of music in the Ely family’s photographs — Hôtel de Boadès, Aix-en-Provence, until 1 November 2026

The Hôtel de Boadès stands on place Jeanne d’Arc, a town house of the first half of the seventeenth century that Blanche d’Estienne de Saint-Jean gave to the city of Aix-en-Provence in 1935, with its income reserved for the local Academy of Sciences, Agriculture, Arts and Letters. The whole building has been listed as a monument historique since 1947. From late August to the beginning of November it houses Musiques en Aix, an exhibition built from a single family archive: the photographs taken in Aix by four generations of the Ely family since Henry Ely opened his Comptoir Photographique in 1888.

The collection is looked after today by CEPPIA, the Collectif Ely Patrimoine Photographique Iconographique Aix-en-Provence, an association that puts the archive at some two million negatives and would like, in time, to give the city a museum of photography. For this exhibition it has drawn out a century of music as the Elys saw it through the lens: the orchestras and balls of the years around 1900, the recitals and the first summers of the Festival d’Art Lyrique, the singers who passed through the city, jazz, pop, street music and the rap and electro-acoustic scenes of the last decades. Most of the prints are black and white. Alongside them the association has set out more than fifty cameras from the late nineteenth century onwards, a reconstruction of the Ely studio as it was in Henry Ely’s day, and a timeline of two hundred years of photography, the pretext for the show being the bicentenary of the medium in 2026.

The exhibition sits inside the city’s programme for that bicentenary, and the municipality lists it on its own pages. It is a modest show in a grand room, and that is its point: a town looking at itself through the one studio that never stopped looking back.

Practical details

• When: 26 August to 1 November 2026; Wednesday to Sunday, 10 am – 12 pm and 1 pm – 6 pm
• Where: Hôtel de Boadès, 8 place Jeanne d’Arc, 13100 Aix-en-Provence, France
• Admission: 10 euros, as published by the organisers; the building is accessible to visitors with reduced mobility
• Organised by: CEPPIA — Collectif Ely Patrimoine Photographique Iconographique Aix-en-Provence, with the Ville d’Aix-en-Provence for the bicentenary of photography
• Information: the association’s own page for the exhibition, and the city’s cultural listings

Cultural Heritage Online lists this exhibition for readers following the photographic archives of European cities and the houses that hold them.