The Bourse de Commerce in Paris opens Remember Me on Wednesday 7 October, until 18 January 2027. The Pinault Collection marks what it calls the bicentenary of photography’s invention with some 700 works by more than 80 artists, according to its press kit, from Gustave Le Gray’s seascapes of the 1850s to Wolfgang Tillmans. Barbara Kruger fills the Rotunda and the 24 display cases around it with words, screens and sound, and a single gallery holds almost 450 photographs by Irving Penn. The full list of works has not been published. But the press kit presents it as the first exhibition at the Bourse made only of photographic masterpieces from the collection, and it opens in an autumn when Paris shows Penn twice, five weeks before Paris Photo returns to the Grand Palais.
Some 700 works, and no chronology
The order is unusual. The curator is Matthieu Humery, the Pinault Collection’s advisor for photography, working with Lola Regard, projects officer, and in the press kit he describes the show as “constructed like a fugue: a free-ranging, non-chronological stroll through all genres of the medium”. The route starts in the Salon, with pictures in which the eye itself is the subject, and passes through Kruger’s Rotunda to two rooms given to single photographers. Gallery 2 holds Penn. Gallery 3 holds about fifty photographs of France by Raymond Depardon, made with a large-format camera on a tripod, one image per place. Gallery 4 is By the Sea, and seven themed sections follow, from Seriality and Typology and The Fabrication of the Image to Face to Face, The Body Revealed and Disappearances / Abstraction. Nan Goldin’s video Stendhal Syndrome, 2024, plays in the Auditorium, and Coleman Collins’s Specular fiction, also from 2024, in the Studio. The museum lists 81 artists on its exhibition page, from Julia Margaret Cameron, Eugène Atget and Alfred Stieglitz to Cindy Sherman, Zanele Muholi and Tyler Mitchell. The collection behind them holds more than 8,000 prints.
Dovima, Migrant Mother and a black rectangle
The works named in the press kit give the measure of the exhibition. Richard Avedon’s Dovima with Elephants, made at the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris in August 1955 with an evening dress by Dior, hangs in three versions of different sizes, and his Marilyn Monroe of 1957 is in Face to Face. Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, 1936, shows hardship in a pair of hands. Elsewhere, Dora Maar’s Les années vous guettent, from the same year, began as an advertisement for an anti-wrinkle cosmetics brand. Helmut Newton’s Big Nude III, first published in Vogue Paris in October 1980, is printed life size. Le Gray’s ships leaving Le Havre, 1856-1857, are in By the Sea, and so is a photograph of 2022 by Tillmans, the Atlantic by moonlight in black and white. Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #21, 1978, and Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, 1932, are on the walls too. Penn’s room mixes the Corner Portraits, the small trades, cigarette butts, faded flowers and fashion, from the 1940s to the early 2000s, in what the museum calls a vast visual mosaic. The last work is not a photograph at all. Man Ray’s Ma dernière photographie, 1929, closes the show, and Humery is clear about it: “Contrary to what the title seems to indicate, Ma dernière photographie is not a photograph, instead a painting on cardboard.”
“Like a relic made of paper, a photograph both celebrates the present and contemplates what was and no longer is.” Matthieu Humery, curator of the exhibition, in the Pinault Collection’s press kit for Remember Me.
Barbara Kruger’s History of Tears in the Rotunda
The title comes from Kruger. Her Untitled (Remember me), 1988/2020, a 23-second video on an LED screen, is part of The History of Tears, the installation she designed for the Rotunda and the 24 display cases of the Passage. Tadao Ando’s curved concrete walls at the centre of the museum carry quotations from literary works, among them George Orwell’s 1984 and Aimé Césaire’s Journal of a Homecoming. The display cases, made for the Exposition Universelle of 1889, have become lightboxes for her injunctions. Two videos have been brought back into the installation, one of them Power, Pleasure, Desire, Disgust, first shown at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, in 1996. Kruger’s own description is short: “An ongoing deluge of the eyes. A fountain of loss and fear. But also of power, pleasure, desire and disgust.” No separate closing date has been given for the installation. There is no catalogue as such either. The Pinault Collection publishes a 60-page leporello with Éditions Dilecta, at 39 euros, and the exhibition itself grew out of a book of 2025, Pinault Collection: 100 Masterpieces of Photography.
A dome of 1812 and a panorama of 1889
The building is part of the visit. It began as an 18th-century wheat market, whose round floor plan was covered in 1812 with a dome of metal and glass, and it became the Bourse de Commerce in 1889, the year of the Exposition Universelle. The panorama painted that year still runs around the dome, 140 metres long and 10 metres high. Four painters shared the continents: Évariste-Vital Luminais, Désiré-François Laugée, Georges-Victor Clairin and Hippolyte Lucas, under the supervision of Alexis Mazerolle. Tadao Ando restored and transformed the building, setting a concrete cylinder 30 metres across and 9 metres high inside the Rotunda, and the museum opened to the public in 2021. Tickets cost 15 euros, or 10 euros for visitors aged 18 to 26 and other concessions. Entry is free for under-18s, and for everyone on the first Saturday of the month from 17.00 to 21.00. The museum opens from 11.00 to 19.00, until 21.00 on Fridays, and closes on Tuesdays. One date matters. The Penn gallery’s own page gives 10 January 2027 as its last day, eight days before the rest of the show.
Paris and the bicentenary of photography
Why now is written into the date. The Pinault Collection frames 2026 as the bicentenary of photography’s invention, and the earliest surviving camera photograph, Nicéphore Niépce’s View from the Window at Le Gras, is dated 1827 by the Harry Ransom Center in Texas, which holds it. Paris has photography in several places this autumn. At the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Penn & Fashion, organised by Pascal Hoël with Frédérique Dolivet, follows Penn’s career from 1947 to 2008, until 17 January 2027. Paris Photo holds its 29th edition at the Grand Palais from 12 to 15 November. The same week as Remember Me, the Orsay opens its Mary Cassatt retrospective and the Fondation Louis Vuitton its Gustave Fayet exhibition. For Humery, the show is also a portrait of the man who assembled the collection. “It reveals a more intimate side to François Pinault,” he says in the interview published with the press kit.
The Luxury.it perspective
The word to keep from this exhibition is disappearance. “François Pinault is obsessed with the notion of disappearance,” Humery says, and Remember Me is built against it: a model in Dior with elephants at the Cirque d’Hiver, a mother’s hands, a nude printed life size, and finally a black rectangle called My Last Photograph. It is rare to see a private collection’s photographs at this scale, and rarer still under a dome of 1812. That is the reason to go. The practical advice is to see the Penn gallery before 10 January. Choose a Friday evening, when the doors stay open until 21.00, or the first Saturday of the month, when entry is free from 17.00, and leave time afterwards for the Marais, where the Maison Européenne de la Photographie follows Penn the fashion photographer from 1947 to 2008.
Related guides
The best hotels in Paris · Lucas Carton reopens in Paris · Art Basel Paris and Frieze London · The 90s at Tate Britain
