Marie Robert

Marie Robert is head curator of photography and cinema at the Musée d’Orsay. She has curated a number of social science exhibitions, including “Qui a peur des femmes photographes?”, “Splendeurs et misères. Images de la prostitution”, “Jazz Power!” and “Enfin le cinéma! She has taught at the École du Louvre (photography and gender) and, with Luce Lebart, edited Une histoire mondiale des femmes photographes (Textuel, 2020). Her research focuses on the relationship between photography and politics.

In 1888, Gabrielle Hébert and painter Alexis Axilette took dazzling shots of female nudes in the garden of the Villa Médicis. Revealing a singular intimacy between the resident and the director’s wife, they mark the beginning of a body of photographic work that is still little known today: moments of camaraderie between artists, portraits, scenes in the surrounding villages, tableaux vivants in the Bosco, or Ernest Hébert at work. Could Gabrielle Hébert’s photographic corpus be the only “diary in pictures” in existence, when testimonials written over the past two centuries by residents, directors or visitors abound? My research residency at Villa Medici will be an opportunity to collect the material traces of the photographic production – often confidential and devoid of artistic ambition – of those who lived, for a year or a lifetime, in this enclave. What counterpoint can these “poor images” (snapshots, on-the-spot scenes, family photos) provide to the Academy’s academic history? The collection of images gathered in this way could be the subject of an exhibition and publication.