Exposition "Louvre Photo" au Musée du Louvre

With this unprecedented exhibition, part of the bicentenary of photography, come and delve into the photographic history of the Louvre, from the first shots to more contemporary techniques!

The opening of the Louvre preceded the birth of photography by a few decades. The museum, which combines reality and imagination and allows visitors to travel through time and space, was a fertile cradle of inspiration for early photographers.

The Louvre Photo exhibition focuses on the Louvre as a model, as a subject, as a source of inspiration, as an object of reappropriation.

Through more than 300 photographs, including photographs of the Louvre, its works, its exhibition rooms, its open spaces, but also famous and anonymous visitors, museum staff, hidden places and behind the scenes – Louvre Photo invites discovery and revelation, by bringing renewed, distanced, sometimes not without humour or eccentricity, perspectives on the museum, the institution and its collections.

Louvre Photo covers the long period from the invention of photography to the present day, from the first photographers to those currently invited by the museum, 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 boom 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 displacement and return of works during the two world wars, and the creation of the Grand Louvre in the 1980s.

By focusing on a single location - that delimited by the walls of the building and the gates of its gardens, particularly the Tuileries - Louvre Photo highlights the photographic collections preserved at the Louvre within the various collection departments, still active documentary collections, 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,