Sawmill and Wood Storage for the Mines near Saint-Etienne

Félix Thiollier was a self-taught photographer who originally trained as an engineer before going into business as a ribbon manufacturer in 1867. He was successful enough that he was able to retire a mere twelve years later, at the age of thirty-seven, and devote himself to his love of art and archaeology. He became a prodigious photographer, amassing some 20,000 negatives before his death in 1914. Although his oeuvre is wide-ranging, the majority of his works are devoted to the study of landscape: ethereal and artistic studies of the natural world counterbalanced with gritty evocations of the coal mining industry in and around his native city of Saint-Etienne. In this pursuit, his photographs share a lineage with those of Victor Regnault, whose picturesque landscapes similarly revealed the irreconcilability of the exploitation and preservation of natural resources several decades earlier.