The facts: the early intuition of one of the directors of the Musée de Bretagne that there is also something fundamental at play in applied studio photography − and the decision to massively collect funds from professional photographers who practice portraiture. They are established in the street or are itinerant, and since the end of the 19th century, they have responded to this popular expectation and frozen moments of life, weddings, communions, in family portraits which, accumulated, write another history of photography and society. These photographers are at the very bottom of the established hierarchy of art. They respond to orders, they are also traders. Mathieu Pernot shares Walker Evans' intuition very early on that in these vernacular practices, there would be at work a less condescending form of truth, not written by scholars but by the people who experience it on a daily basis. In his first series on the Gypsies in Arles, Mathieu Pernot already had the idea of ​​appropriating a popular process and collecting photo booths made with the playful complicity of children. Carrying this inversion of the hierarchy to the limit, he now finds his “artist” photographs cut into medallions or even exhibited outdoors on the tombstones of the Arles cemetery. Art and life have mixed. Several hundred thousand images of these village studios were therefore collected by the Musée de Bretagne. Photography was very early linked to these sometimes outdated family rituals, such as communion - or soon marriage - and itself became part of the ritual and then ritual, often remaining its sole testimony. The photographers did not work thousands of kilometers from home but often on the street corner, and tried to respond to implicit specifications. The image should remain for eternity, the smile and shiny teeth of the selfie were not the norm then. The clothes were chosen and the pose composed. A few attributes sometimes to show the client's success or profession. The light is not too cruel, without being as pictorialist as that of bourgeois portraits of the 19th century. The subject is clear and centered, the background according to the situation, the fashion of the moment, the desires or the possibilities. The image also created society, it would participate in the creation of the myth of the family and solidify relationships that were intended to be strong − and sometimes were. In a succession of portraits chosen from thousands, there remains the sensation of time slipping away from us, of the fragility and aging of skin or hollowing faces. And finally the force of the gaze which freezes and defies eternity.