Remember Me by Pinault Collection brings 700 photographs to Paris
Pinault Collection presents Remember Me, a major photography exhibition at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, bringing together approximately 700 works by more than 80 artists. Running from 7 October 2026 to 18 January 2027, the exhibition marks the bicentenary of photography through a selection spanning the nineteenth century to contemporary practice.
Curated by Matthieu Humery, Advisor for Photography of the Pinault Collection, in collaboration with Lola Regard, the exhibition examines photography’s relationship with memory, identity and representation. Its title comes from a work by American artist Barbara Kruger, whose monumental installation occupies the museum’s central Rotunda.
Organised without a chronological sequence, Remember Me establishes connections between different generations of photographers, artistic movements and technical approaches. The exhibition draws from the Pinault Collection’s holdings of more than 8,000 photographic prints, bringing together historical photographs, experimental compositions, portraiture and contemporary imagery.
Works by Gustave Le Gray, Man Ray, Dorothea Lange, Richard Avedon, Cindy Sherman and Wolfgang Tillmans appear across thematic galleries addressing composition, seriality, the human body and disappearance. The curatorial arrangement encourages visitors to consider how photographs preserve individual experiences while contributing to collective visual memory.
At the centre of the Bourse de Commerce, Barbara Kruger’s The History of Tears introduces an immersive installation combining moving images, language and sound. Developed specifically for the Rotunda and its surrounding 24 display cases, the work extends across Tadao Ando’s curved concrete walls through projected texts and video sequences.
The display cases become illuminated surfaces carrying Kruger’s messages about memory, power and human relationships. Nearby, Untitled (Remember me) (1988/2020) uses an LED screen displaying a close-up eye alongside changing textual commands, accompanied by industrial music. Together, these works investigate the influence of images and language on perception.
Two substantial presentations focus on Irving Penn and Raymond Depardon. Gallery 2 houses Le monde selon Penn, an installation assembling almost 450 photographs produced between the 1940s and early 2000s. Fashion photography, portraits, still lifes and floral studies demonstrate Penn’s precise approach to composition and printing.
In Gallery 3, Depardon’s La France presents 48 colour photographs documenting roads, provincial towns, houses and commercial buildings. Produced through extensive journeys across France, the series records ordinary environments and architectural details that reflect the country’s changing social landscape.
Other galleries examine the photographic image through its techniques and recurring subjects. Historical seascapes by Gustave Le Gray appear in dialogue with works by Eileen Quinlan and Hiroshi Sugimoto, while sections dedicated to hands, faces and bodies bring together photographs by Dora Maar, Claude Cahun, Annie Leibovitz and Helmut Newton. Richard Avedon’s Dovima with Elephants appears in three different print sizes, illustrating how scale affects photographic interpretation. Further works by Francesca Woodman and Tyler Mitchell address absence and the gradual disappearance of the human figure.
The exhibition also extends into the museum’s Auditorium and Studio. Nan Goldin’s Stendhal Syndrome (2024) combines images of classical artworks with portraits of friends and lovers, accompanied by music and narration. Coleman Collins’s Specular Fiction (2024) considers digital reproduction and the preservation of cultural objects through three-dimensional modelling. Together, these presentations complete an exhibition in which photography functions as both a historical record and an evolving artistic medium, connecting personal remembrance with broader questions of time, presence and loss.
All images courtesy of Pinault Collection, shared with permission
