Louvre Photo

The Louvre opened just a few decades before the invention of photography. Combining reality and the world of imagination, journeying through both time and space, the museum would go on to become a wellspring of inspiration for those who practised this new art form. This exhibition ‘Louvre Photo’ takes the Louvre as a model, a subject, a source of inspiration and a starting point for reinvention. Through more than 300 photos of the Louvre – its artworks, its exhibition galleries and its open spaces, as well as visitors both famous and anonymous, museum workers, hidden nooks and behind-the-scenes corridors – ‘Louvre Photo’ invites visitors to explore and uncover, taking a step back and offering a new look at the museum, the institution and its collections – sometimes with a touch of humour and subversiveness.

‘Louvre Photo’ covers the long period spanning from the invention of photography until today, from the first photographers to those invited to photograph the museum in modern times – most recently Robert Polidori. This was a period characterised by momentous events, like the Paris Commune, the First and Second World Wars, and the expansion of tourism and diplomatic relations during the Trente Glorieuses, the thirty-year span of economic prosperity that France enjoyed from 1945 to 1975. In that same time, the Louvre’s history was marked by several milestones, such as its transformation from a palace into a museum under the Second Empire, the displacement and then return of its artworks during the First and Second World Wars, and the Grand Louvre works of the 1980s.

‘Louvre Photo’ limits its subject to a single setting, delimited by the walls of the palace and the gates of the Tuileries Garden. The exhibition will bring out the Louvre’s wealth of photographic archives from its curatorial departments and active documentary records, as well as collections from various French institutions, including the National Archives, the Médiathèque du Patrimoine et de la Photographie, the French National Library, the Musée d’Orsay, the Musée Carnavalet and the Historical Library of the City of Paris. The exhibition will also showcase photographic commissions ordered by the Louvre from the early 2000s.

Exhibition design by Juan-Felipe Alarcón, with graphic design by Atelier Pierre/Pierre.

This exhibition is part of the Ministry of Culture’s Photography Bicentenary label and official programme from 1 September 2026 to 30 September 2027.

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Curatorship:

Quentin Bajac, Director of the Jeu de Paume

Dominique de Font-Réaulx, Senior Curator, Advisor to the President-Director of the Musée du Louvre

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Acknowledgements:

This exhibition is sponsored by Visa Infinite.