Entitled “Remember Me”, in reference to a work by Barbara Kruger, who is also presenting an installation in the museum’s Rotunda and display cases this autumn, the exhibition pays tribute to the photographic medium. Through masterpieces and icons from the Pinault Collection, the exhibition is like a fugue. Constructed as a free-ranging journey without any chronology, it elicits unexpected correspondences and dialogues between genres and eras to offer viewers an open, sensorially driven experience of the history of photography.
From historical photographs to contemporary images, from Gustave Le Gray to Cindy Sherman, and from Dorothea Lange to Wolfgang Tillmans, by way of Man Ray and Louise Lawler, the Pinault Collection embraces the entire history of the photographic medium. It also showcases the breadth of its aesthetics and techniques. Presenting it in its entirety on the occasion of the bicentenary of the invention of photography feels especially relevant. And, through a selection of approximately seven hundred works, this is precisely what the exhibition "Remember Me" does, for the first time ever.
"Among those objects that have a particular relationship with memory, photography today occupies a very special place. In 1827, this process was first praised for its ability to reproduce reality with an unprecedented degree of accuracy, but it soon came to provide the best possible material representations of mnemonic images. In 1859, Charles Baudelaire came to recognise this capacity to hold memory. To stop a moment in time, to immortalise a face, to allow the inescapably ephemeral nature of existence to live on —this is the essence of photography. It is about not forgetting, making the gaps in our memories disappear, reviving and sustaining our history, and thus defying death. While an impression is by its very nature evanescent, a photograph instead endures. Like a relic made of paper, a photograph both celebrates the present and contemplates what was and no longer is."
— Matthieu Humery, Advisor for Photography, Pinault Collection
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