Some collect stamps. Others collect Panini stickers or doll figurines. Matthieu Nicol, on the other hand, collects images. The 45-year-old Frenchman, a former press image editor and web designer, spends whole days online, searching for fascinating photographs. These are not paper prints, but digital files that he stores on hard disks and in the cloud. For hours on end, he rummages through visual banks and archive collections, looking for surprising shots.

For several years now, he has been fascinated by the photo collections of major American institutions such as NASA and the Library of Congress. These images are made available to all, following the example of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France's Gallica accessible platform. "We're sitting on a gold mine," said Nicol, with a smile.

In 2022, he struck gold: the Combat Capabilities Development Command Soldier Center (DEVCOM), formerly known as the Natick Soldier Systems Center, named after its headquarters in Natick, Massachusetts. This US Army entity, largely unknown to the general public, is tasked with logistics, designing food rations, uniforms, shelters, tents and everything else that supports soldiers' daily lives, both in the field and in the barracks. "It's a kind of laboratory, where the working and living conditions of an entire society – hundreds of thousands of people in the army – are invented," explained Nicol.

'Fashion Army'

In the early 2020s, a collection of 14,000 photos from the center's archives was declassified. Obsessed with culinary imagery, to the point of creating a much-followed Instagram account (@vintage_food_photography) filled with images of pies, mayonnaise-climbing shrimp and meat jelly, Nicol selected gastronomy-related images from this treasure trove. His book, Better Food For Our Fighting Men, was published in 2022 and reissued in March by RVB Books.

This summer, at the Rencontres d'Arles, he presents the second part of this work, "Fashion Army," devoted this time to clothing. The collection includes camouflage jackets, night-vision goggles and bulletproof vests. But it also includes maternity wear, underwear, gold shorts, connected clothing and fabrics for extreme temperatures. The compilation has been published by SPBH Editions, on glossy paper with a soft cover, like a fashion magazine.

"We don't know what these images were used for. We know they were produced between the 1960s and 1990s, from the end of the Vietnam War to the first Gulf War. But what they were used for is a mystery. Internal catalog? Documentation for engineers? Something else?" The US Army's communications department gave him the cold shoulder. The only certainty is that the images were for internal use, not for publicity purposes. Their declassification indicates that they are now obsolete.

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