Titled "Remember Me", in reference to an original work by Barbara Kruger that occupies the museum's Rotunda, the exhibition offers a tribute to the photographic medium. Through masterpieces and icons from the Pinault Collection, the itinerary resembles a fugue: a free crossing, without chronology, that allows for unexpected correspondences and dialogues between genres and eras, offering visitors a sensitive and open experience of the history of photography.
From heritage photography to contemporary imagery, from Gustave Le Gray to Cindy Sherman, from Dorothea Lange to Wolfgang Tillmans, including Man Ray or Louise Lawler, the Pinault Collection embraces the entire history of the photographic medium. It also reflects all of its aesthetics and techniques. Presenting it in its entirety on the occasion of the bicentenary of the invention of photography seems self-evident. Through a selection of around seven hundred works, this is what the exhibition "Remember Me" does for the first time, its title resonating in a thousand ways.
"Among the objects that have a particular relationship with memory, photography today occupies a very special place. In 1827, this process was first praised for its ability to reproduce reality with unprecedented fidelity. Nevertheless, it very quickly came to embody the best material representation of mnemonic images, and Charles Baudelaire, as early as 1859, perceived this memorial value. Freezing a moment T, immortalizing a face, making the inescapable ephemerality of existence live on and survive: this is what photography essentially entails. Not to forget. To erase the gaps in our memories. To revive and nourish our history by outwitting death. For if an evocation is by nature evanescent, a photograph, on the contrary, endures. Like a paper relic, photography celebrates the present while allowing us to contemplate what was but is no longer."
— Matthieu Humery, photography advisor, Pinault Collection