The opening of the Louvre preceded the birth of photography by a few decades. The museum, which combines the real and the imaginary and allows one to travel through time and space, provided a fertile source of inspiration for the first photographers. The exhibition Louvre Photo focuses on the Louvre as model, as subject, as source of inspiration, and as object of détournement. Through more than 300 photographs, including photographs of the Louvre, its works, its exhibition rooms, its open spaces, but also famous and anonymous visitors, the museum's staff, its hidden places and behind-the-scenes areas, Louvre Photo invites discovery and revelation, bringing together renewed, detached gazes, sometimes not without humour or incongruity, on the museum, the institution and its collections.
Louvre Photo covers the long period that has passed since the invention of photography up to the present, from the first photographers to those invited by the museum today, such as Robert Polidori recently. This period was marked by major historical events such as the Commune, the First and Second World Wars, and the diplomatic and tourist flourishing of the Trente Glorieuses. It was also punctuated by key moments in the history of the Louvre, such as the transformation of the palace into a museum under the Second Empire, the removal and return of works during the two World Wars, and the creation of the Grand Louvre in the 1980s.
By situating itself within a unity of place - that delimited by the walls of the building and the railings of its gardens, notably the Tuileries - Louvre Photo highlights the photographic holdings kept at the Louvre within the various collection departments, documentary holdings that remain active, as well as the collections of French institutions, notably the Archives nationales, the Médiathèque de la Photographie et du Patrimoine, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the musée d'Orsay, the musée Carnavalet, and the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris. The exhibition also showcases the commissions given to photographers by the Louvre since the early 2000s.
Join a guided tour of the exhibition every Sunday at 11:30 and enjoy free, open-access "mini-visits" during the museum's late openings (Wednesday and Friday) at 18:30, 19:00, 19:30 and 20:00.