Louvre Photo

The Louvre opened several decades before the birth of photography. The museum, which blends the real and the imaginary and allows travel through time and space, has provided a fertile cradle of inspiration for the earliest photographers. The Louvre Photo exhibition at the Louvre Museum focuses on the Louvre as model, as subject, as source of inspiration, as object of appropriation. Through more than 300 photographs of the Louvre, its works, its exhibition spaces, its open areas, but also its famous and anonymous visitors, its participants, its hidden places and its backstage areas, Louvre Photo invites discovery and revelation, summoning renewed, detached viewpoints, sometimes not without humor or incongruity, on the museum, the institution and its collections.

Louvre Photo covers the long period that has elapsed since the invention of photography up to today, from the first photographers to those invited today by the museum, such as Robert Polidori. This period has been marked by historical events such as the Commune, World War I and World War II, and the diplomatic and tourist expansion of the Thirty Glorious Years. It has also been punctuated by key moments in the Louvre's history, 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 situating itself within a unity of place, the space bounded by the building's walls and by the iron gates of its gardens, notably the Tuileries, Louvre Photo highlights the photographic archives preserved at the Louvre within the various departments of collections, active documentary archives, as well as the collections of French institutions, notably the National Archives, the Médiathèque de la photographie et du patrimoine, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Musée d’Orsay, the Musée Carnavalet, the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris. The exhibition also highlights commissions made to photographers by the Louvre since the early 2000s.

The scenography is by Juan-Felipe Alarcon and the graphics by Atelier Pierre/Pierre.

This exhibition is designated by the Bicentennial of Photography by the Ministry of Culture and is part of the official Bicentennial program from September 1, 2026 to September 30, 2027.