“Remember Me”: Two Centuries of Photography as a Fugue

To mark photography’s bicentenary, the Bourse de Commerce — Pinault Collection in Paris is showing “Remember Me”: more than 700 works by 80 artists, drawn from a holding of over 8,000 prints. The route ignores chronology and pairs Gustave Le Gray with Cindy Sherman, Dorothea Lange with Wolfgang Tillmans, with memory as its thread. It runs through January 18, 2027.

Memory as the thread

The title comes from a work by Barbara Kruger: a close-up eye above two words, “Remember me.” Curator Matthieu Humery, photography adviser to the Pinault Collection, says it captures both the exhibition’s premise and its chapters. It is the first show at the Bourse de Commerce devoted exclusively to photographic masterpieces from the collection, and it draws on the 2025 book 100 chefs-d’œuvre de la photographie.

Humery describes the route as a fugue: free, non-chronological, built on formal and iconographic echoes. Avedon’s Marilyn Monroe hangs beside Sherman playing the actress; Le Gray’s seascapes sit near Eileen Quinlan’s waves. Visitors are invited to play with the images “like dominoes,” starting with a never-before-shown Steichen photograph of hands shuffling dominoes. The show ends on Man Ray’s Ma dernière photographie (1929), which, Humery notes, is a painted black square rather than a photograph.

Three headline presentations

In the Rotunda and the Passage’s twenty-four windows, Kruger’s The History of Tears, conceived for the space, mixes words, injunctions, film sequences and voices. Tadao Ando’s curved walls carry quotations from Orwell’s 1984 and Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. In an alcove, Untitled (Remember me) (1988/2020) turns an emblematic 1980s work into an LED piece with a bloodshot eye and contradictory commands.

Gallery 2 shows more than 400 photographs by Irving Penn from the collection, in an unprecedented non-chronological arrangement: the Corner Portraits sit beside cigarettes, faded flowers and fashion silhouettes. Gallery 3 presents about fifty images from Raymond Depardon’s series “La France,” shot from the 1980s with a view camera, one image per place. It is a France in color that, Humery says, is disappearing.

Chapters, and a vanishing point

Between these sit thematic sections on the photographer’s eye, the sea (Le Gray to Tillmans), seriality and typology (Duchenne de Boulogne, Sander, Boris Mikhailov’s hand-colored “Luriki”), the making of the image (Avedon’s three sizes of Dovima with Elephants) and composition (Fenton to Sherman). Further galleries turn to hands (Lange’s Migrant Mother, Dora Maar’s Les années vous guettent), faces (Avedon’s Marilyn Monroe) and the body (Helmut Newton’s Big Nude III; Tarrah Krajnak’s reenactment of Weston’s nudes).

The last gallery shifts toward disappearance and abstraction, with Francesca Woodman and Tyler Mitchell. Two video works sit apart: Nan Goldin’s Stendhal Syndrome (2024) in the Auditorium and Coleman Collins’s Specular Fiction (2024) in the Studio. Humery reads the whole selection as an intimate portrait of collector François Pinault, with his love of the sea, his attachment to the peasant world and his preoccupation with disappearance.

Practical information

• Dates: October 7, 2026 – January 18, 2027.
• Venue: Bourse de Commerce — Pinault Collection, 2 rue de Viarmes, 75001 Paris.
• Hours: daily except Tuesday, 11 am–7 pm; Fridays until 9 pm.
• Admission: €15 full price, €10 reduced; free for visitors under 18.
• Catalogue: 100 chefs-d’œuvre de la photographie. Collection Pinault (Pinault Collection and Éditions Dilecta, 2025), €49.

Source: “Remember Me” press kit, Pinault Collection. Quotations translated from the French.