Agnès Varda

Having arrived in Paris in 1943, Agnès Varda studied at the École du Louvre and decided to become a photographer, a profession that enabled her to combine manual and intellectual activities. While she was learning her craft, she shared an apartment near Pigalle with three other young women. Her roommates were her first models and the banks of the Seine her first Parisian landscapes. She was already asserting her own style, a kind of strangeness influenced by surrealism, and her artistic identity.

In 1951, Agnès Varda moved to 86, Rue Daguerre, an unusual location. She turned two former shops separated by a courtyard/alley into a workshop, studio, and laboratory. This workspace and creative base was also a living space shared with the sculptor Valentine Schlegel and a family of Spanish refugees. In the courtyard, she organized her first exhibition in 1954 and shot her first films.

In the 1950s, Agnès Varda was the official photographer for Jean Vilar’s Théâtre National Populaire and the Avignon Festival. This activity opened the doors of the Paris art world to her: she produced numerous portraits and features, photographing figures such as Calder, Brassaï, Suzanne Flon, Giulietta Masina, and Fellini. Combining humour and strangeness, bordering on a form of darkness, she gradually established herself as a distinctive voice on the postwar intellectual scene.

Agnès Varda excelled at reportage, while asserting an aesthetic and a method marked by the language of film, in certain subjects. Like a filmmaker, she staged her shots and directed her models: a little girl dressed as an angel or young actors miming various kinds of romantic behaviour.

In 1961, with her film Cleo from 5 to 7, Agnès Varda produced both a portrait of a woman and a documentary on Paris, in which the city reflects the moods of her heroine, frantic with fear of cancer. In 1967, she filmed Paris again, in tune with the feelings afflicting a young mother, panic-stricken by the Vietnam War. Being close to the filmmakers of the New Wave, Varda framed her view of Paris in a dialogue between the intimate and the political.

In her photographs and then in her films, Agnès Varda questioned the way women are viewed, particularly in One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, where she defended women’s rights and contraception. Her feminism was part of a wider focus on humanity: from the 1950s onward, she highlighted the impoverished population that frequented the Rue Mouffetard street market (L’Opéra-Mouffe, 1958). Later, in Daguerreotypes (1975), she turned her attention to the shopkeepers of Rue Daguerre, whom she described as the “silent majority”. She captured gestures, faces, and stories of everyday life with poetic sincerity, in a style between social documentary and surrealist homage.

Until the mid-1960s, Agnès Varda photographed young actors, such as Delphine Seyrig and Gérard Depardieu, in her courtyard. After making her neighbouring shopkeepers famous in Daguerreotypes (1975), she increasingly identified with her street, to the point of calling herself a “Daguerreotypist”. Over the years, the courtyard-studio became a courtyard-garden, sometimes extending to Rue Daguerre, as in the “auto-documentary” The Beaches of Agnès (2008). It was also the place where Agnès Varda told her story, staged herself, and showcased her work.

In Paris, Agnès Varda was not tempted to film the picturesque side of the capital. She was drawn to aspects that do not attract attention and to the places she knew best: her own neighborhood and the banks of the Seine. The excerpts brought together in the exhibition show how her camera moved around the city. They borrow from every genre (fiction, documentary, advertising) and all formats (feature films, shorts, screen tests).

Special focus on Villa Medici

In 1959, while scouting locations in Venice and its surroundings, Agnès Varda captured scenes of everyday life and recurrent motifs such as washing drying in windows and dark passageways.
During this trip she composed one of her famous self-portraits in front of a painting by Gentile Bellini, humorously drawing attention to her by now iconic hairstyle. When she was sent to Rome in 1963 to photograph the director Luchino Visconti, she visited Jean-Luc Godard on the set of Contempt and immortalized Brigitte Bardot, Jack Palance, and Michel Piccoli.

Paris Musées is the public institution that brings together the twelve museums of the City of Paris and two heritage sites. The leading museum network in Europe, Paris Musées received more than 4.8 million visitors in 2024. It includes art museums (Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Petit Palais – Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris), history museums (Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris, Musée de la Libération de Paris – Musée du Général Leclerc – Musée Jean Moulin), former artists’ studios (Musée Bourdelle, Musée Zadkine, Musée de la Vie Romantique), writers’ homes (Balzac’s house, Victor Hugo’s houses in Paris and Guernsey), a fashion museum (Palais Galliera – Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris), museums of major donors (Musée Cernuschi – Musée des Arts de l’Asie de la Ville de Paris, Musée Cognacq-Jay), as well as the heritage sites of the Paris Catacombs and the Archaeological Crypt of the Île de la Cité.

Housed in the Hôtel Carnavalet and the Hôtel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, in the heart of the Marais district, the Carnavalet Museum is the foremost reference point for the history of Paris. Its collections, comprising some 640,000 items, make it one of the leading French museums. Paintings, sculptures, pieces of furniture, woodwork, decorative art and historical objects, signs, photographs, drawings, prints, posters, medals, coins, archaeological collections… 3,800 works are displayed in an outstanding historical setting, enabling visitors to explore the capital from prehistoric times to the present day. The history of Paris is recounted in a unique and vibrant way: at once historical, documentary, sentimental, and close to the essence of Parisians.

The Institute for Photography, launched in 2018 by the Hauts-de-France Region in collaboration with the Rencontres d’Arles, is a venue for exhibitions, resources, exchanges, and experimentation entirely devoted to photography, located in the heart of Old Lille. Reflecting the desire to provide a secure base for the image within a region with a strong cultural identity by endowing it with an international benchmark institution in the field of photography, the Institute for Photography aims to develop the culture of the image among people of all kinds, to preserve photographic heritage, and to support research and creation.

In 1954, to produce her first full-length film, La Pointe Courte, a forerunner of the New Wave, Agnès Varda created a cooperative, Tamaris Films, which she subsequently turned into a producion company. In 1975, the company adopted the name Ciné-Tamaris during the production of the film Daguerréotypes. From 1990, Ciné-Tamaris bought most of Jacques Demy’s films to add them to its catalogue, and in 2010 it began to digitize and restore them, as well as those of Agnès Varda, most of which are available in 2K and 4K. Ciné-Tamaris produced or co-produced the majority of Agnès Varda’s films, up to her last feature-length film, Visages Villages (Faces Places), co-directed with JR in 2017, and her last documentary, Varda by Agnès, in 2019. Ciné-Tamaris manages the two filmmakers’ photographic collections and archives.

In 2026, Paris and Rome celebrate 70 years of a unique twinning agreement, formalized in 1956 to affirm a special bond between two capitals that chose each other. The year will be punctuated by a joint program combining culture, heritage, festivals, exhibitions, gastronomy, and large popular events. This anniversary highlights a living dialogue, lasting friendship, and even stronger cooperation between the two cities.