Joliot-Curie collection.

An exhibit highlighting recently rediscovered photos relating to Irène Joliot-Curie and Frédéric Joliot opened at Paris’s Musée des arts et métiers on 31 May and will run through 16 October.

The photos, taken in the 1940s and 1950s by photographer Robert Doisneau, began as part of a Vichy government propaganda effort to glamorize French intellectual life. Many of the nearly 100 photos of the Nobel Prize-winning couple and their laboratories “give a feeling of fantastic or surrealistic activities,” says curator Ginette Gablot. “Doisneau’s photos show the development of accelerators and the transformation of labs as instruments got larger and more diverse.” Also on display are contemporary comic drawings inspired by science, video clips, scientific instruments, and a cyclotron log book from the time of Germany’s occupation of France. Both the photo above and part of the 12-m-high, 3-MV impulse generator it depicts are in the exhibit.