The History of Photography According to François Pinault

How do you tell the story of 200 years of photography in one space, even one as impressive as the Bourse de Commerce? For curator Matthieu Humery, the answer begins with abandoning obligation in favour of a ‘sensorially driven experience’.

“We are not a museum, and I do not want to explain, in a very didactic way, the history of photography,” he says to The Art Journal ahead of last week’s opening. The exhibition Remember Me fills one of Paris’s landmark buildings with more than 800 works from the Pinault Collection.

This is, after all, a private institution whose programme follows the interests of an individual collector. So, despite publicity promising photography’s ‘entire history’, what unfolds is both partial and personal.

Remember Me delivers a largely hands-off ‘free-ranging, non-chronological stroll’ through the 90-year-old multi-billionaire’s formidable holdings. Shaped by a curator who is particularly interested in how images inhabit space, it is often spectacular.

Yet whether that spectacle adds up to any thoughtful position on photography’s past, present and future is another question.

Irving Penn, 'Cuzco Children' (1948). Photo: Courtesy of Pinault Collection.

The World According to Penn is a case in point. The enormous space given to just one man in this exhibition-within-an-exhibition is lopsided, reflecting Pinault’s fascination with the prolific image maker whose 1948 picture, Cuzco Children, sparked his collecting of photography. And yet it seems an odd decision given there is currently a sizeable show devoted entirely to Penn’s work just a 20-minute walk away at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie.

That exhibition is included in the Bicentennial of Photography, marking 200 years since Nicéphore Niépce created View from the Window at Le Gras, the oldest surviving photograph. Remember Me takes the same anniversary as its cue, but is not part of France's official celebrations.

Most of the nearly 450 Penn works in the Bourse de Commerce are displayed together in a large, curvaceous installation, hung in an elegant salon style that defies narrative. Photographs from different eras and genres are arranged in irregular grid formations, many far above eye line, which seems like an exercise in style over substance.

Exhibition view of 'The World of Irving Penn'. Photo: Courtesy of The Pinault Collection.

I am reminded that Humery also curated Diane Arbus: Constellation, an equally theatrical presentation whose immersive, nonlinear approach provides the blueprint. That show, which invited visitors to create their own narratives, was praised and criticised in equal measure, delighting some with its break from conventional formats, while others said it failed to deal with the ethical questions surrounding Arbus’s privileged gaze.

The same can be said of The World According to Penn, where portraits of many of the 20th century’s leading personalities are scattered among fashion, flowers, nudes and still lifes, where occasional colour pops (my favourite, an oozing ripe camembert) break from monochrome. There are photographs from series such as Small Trades (1950–51) and, most problematically, Worlds in a Small Room (1967–71), which Martha Rosler described as an ‘effete mimicry of anthropological documentary’.

The lack of context here is intentional rather than an omission. So does that serve the avoidance of difficult subjects, or is it an act of anti-presentism? The clue may belong next door, where Barbara Kruger takes up the vast rotunda, the centrepiece exhibition space within the Bourse de Commerce.

A prime example of Neoclassical circular architecture, the building’s previous life as the home of the Paris stock exchange reads like a billionaire’s idea of a conceptual joke, with its former trading floor now housing a vast Tadao Ando-designed concrete cylinder nine metres high and 29 metres in diameter. That’s not the only historical baggage. Beneath the dome, restored nineteenth-century murals celebrate global commerce through colonial extraction.

At its 2021 opening, following the rented building’s €160m (£135m) reconfiguration, David Hammons’s Minimum Security was deliberately positioned in relation to that history. In Remember Me, the relationship between setting and subject isn’t so immediately obvious.

Kruger’s The History of Tears is a 24-panel text and video installation that makes extraordinary use of the space. But what troubles me is how comfortably the work appears to fit. The commanding graphics lend themselves to the monumental architecture, becoming another element of the spectacle her borrowed words warn against.

Exhibition view of Barbara Kruger’s The History of Tears installed in the rotunda of the Bourse du Commerce, once the reading floor of the Paris stock exchange. Photo: Courtesy of the Pinault Collection

Yet part of her quotation of Aimé Césaire, the Martinican poet and politician who cofounded the Négritude movement, has me thinking: “beware of assuming the sterile attitude of a spectator”.

The words bounce around this strange hollow chamber and seem to go nowhere. They continue to echo as I make my way around the upper floors, agitating, asking me to resist passive observation, to reject detachment.

A concern for the workings of images – both their power and their mechanics – runs throughout the exhibition, particularly on the upper mezzanine floors, where we are treated, in themed sections, to a tour of more of Pinault’s photographic treasures.

Humery’s promise of ‘a free-ranging journey without any chronology, eliciting unexpected correspondences and dialogues’ is most effective here, highlighting the narrative and conceptual strategies photographers employ and how context gives meaning to their work.

‘By the Sea’, for example, pits Gustave Le Gray together with Zoe Leonard, Paul Outerbridge, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Eileen Quinlan and Wolfgang Tillmans in an overcrowded room to illustrate time, abstraction and process. The centrepieces are Le Gray’s singular shots, shown unmounted so that we experience their fragility, emphasising the materiality of the prints, another recurring theme.

Fragile Gustave Le Gray prints hang in front of Wolfgang Tillmans’ Lunar Landscape. Photo: Courtesy of the Pinault Collection

At the height of his career in the 1850s, Le Gray brought the age-old genre of seascape painting to photography, using the recently discovered wet collodion process to produce finer details and shorter exposure times, which prior to the invention, had been technically impossible. He also used two glass negatives to balance the exposure of sea and sky, creating some of the first composite photographs made solely for artistic purposes, an early example of the manipulation of reality.

Behind them we see Wolfgang Tillmans’ Lunar Landscape (2022) in large format, its myriad of details revealing the work of unseen power – the moon’s surface reflected in the ripples of the Atlantic Ocean at night.

A floor above, The Fabrication of the Image’ foregrounds experiment with works by Man Ray, Weegee and Cecil Beaton, while also highlighting the effect of size, presenting three versions of Richard Avedon’s Dovima with Elephants (1955) – small, medium and large – side by side.

‘Seriality and Typology’, pits Walker Evans African Negro Art (1935), opposite Boris Mikhaïlov’s hand-coloured Luriki (1971-1985). Once again, there’s no attempt to explain problematic language, or to open up the story of Evans’ series, commissioned by MoMA, and its liberal intentions.

In ‘The Body Revealed’, we see Helmut Newton’s Big Nudes placed in uncomfortable proximity with photographers such as Annie Leibovitz and Zanele Muholi. We are presented with an obvious contrast between the female body framed by male desire, and the assertion of the self in the work of women and non-binary photographers. Yet a conversation doesn’t really evolve as we enter the final theme.

Exhibition view of Helmut Newton’s Big Nudes in a section titled, ‘The Body Revealed’. Photo: Courtesy of the Pinault Collection

Not for the first time, I am left wondering whether the intention is to quickly move on from anything too deep, or whether Humery is being true to his word. Is he simply getting out of the way, purposefully avoiding didactic commentary, espousing the words of Cesaire? Decide for yourself, it seems to be saying. Or am I merely projecting my own thoughts onto an enjoyable romp around an historic collection of photographs?

The exhibition ends with ‘Disappearances / Abstraction’. Here, the most contemporary work on show, Lamine’s Apparition (After Frederick Sommer) (2024) by Tyler Mitchell, is seen alongside Ma Dernière Photographie (‘My Last Photograph’, 1929) by Man Ray, which isn’t, in fact, a photograph at all.

As an ending, it’s as playfully provocative as the artist’s own intent, reducing the photographic exposure to a blank surface. It was the American artist’s contribution to a debate in L'Art vivant asking, ‘Is photography an art?’. Man Ray’s answer was pithy: a black, painted square on cardboard. Asked to elaborate, he said that the question was pointless.

‘Art is a thing of the past. We need something else. You’ve got to watch light at work. It’s light that creates. I sit down in front of my sheet of photographic paper and I think.’