LA FRANCE
AVEDON
D’
VIEUX MONDE, NEW LOOK
exposition
François-Mitterrand, Paris 13e
18 octobre 2016 26 février 2017 bnf.fr
dans le cadre de
avec le soutien de
avec le concours de
Réservations FNAC 0892 684 694
(0,34 € TTC/mn) / www.fnac.com
Audrey Hepburn with Balloons, Funny Face, 1957. Funny Face © Paramount Pictures. All rights reserved. BnF/délégation à la Communication - impression Stipa
PRESS KIT
Summary
Press release and practical information
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Iconography
5
Forward
8
Exhibition path
9
Layout
12
Artist Biography
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The Terra Foundation for American Art, patron of the exhibition
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The Louis Roederer Foundation, patron of the exhibition
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RATP invites
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François-Mitterrand
18 October 2016 I 26 February 2017
PRESS RELEASE
La France d’Avedon
Vieux monde, New Look
(Avedon’s France : Old World, New Look)
Audrey Hepburn, actress, on the set of
Funny Face, Paris, 1956
Catherine Deneuve, actress, Los Angeles,
September 22, 1968
François Truffaut and Jean-Pierre Léaud, film director and
actor, Paris, June 20, 1971
Photographs by Richard Avedon © The Richard Avedon Foundation
For the first time anywhere, the BnF explores the unique relationship that photographer Richard
Avedon built up with France. Famous right from the outset for his fashion photographs, Avedon
developed an outstanding life’s work which was influenced in no small part by his many French
encounters. The exhibition brings together some 200 pieces, chosen for the story they have to
tell : that of the deep affection for France by one of the greatest American photographers of the
20th century.
Avedon never stopped infusing his photography with inspiration and fresh styles borrowed from and
geared towards other forms, including written text, books, magazines, film and dance. This constant
reinvention is particularly noticeable in the work that he developed in connection with France. From
the 1940s, when he came to photograph the fashion collections in Paris for the magazine Harper’s
Bazaar, to his 1968 trip to work on the publication of a monograph of Jacques Henri Lartigue, right
through to his collaboration with Nicole Wisniak for the magazine Egoïste from 1985, every foray Avedon made into French culture prompted him to cast his work in a new light and to continue honing a
hybrid approach to photography. «La France d’Avedon» (Avedon’s France) is laid out in four exhibition
stages, each one attesting to the wealth of his œuvre. It is told through an array of celebrity portraits
taken by the photographer himself, concentrating on a film, a book and a magazine.
The portraits
Jean Cocteau, Coco Chanel, Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau, Yannick Noah, Isabelle Adjani, Yves
Montand, Simone Signoret… An eye-catching cast of stars and icons of culture shows the immense
appeal that French culture held for Avedon and highlights his remarkable achievements in portraiture
- spanning almost fifty years.
A film : Funny Face
In 1956, Richard Avedon was hired as visual consultant for the film Funny Face directed by Stanley
Donen. Shot partly in France, the film is loosely based on Avedon’s career as a fashion photographer
in Paris. Photographs that Avedon took for the film during the famous fashion sitting have been extracted and enlarged for the first time, immersing visitors in an idealised version of 1950s Paris. Also
on display to visitors are a Vistavision movie camera as was used on Funny Face and the same type of
photo booth in which Avedon had Audrey Hepburn, her husband Mel Ferrer and Truman Capote pose
– evidence that, more than technical skill, the eye is what really matters in photography.
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A book : Diary of a Century
Richard Avedon’s close ties with France can also be seen in his contributions to the book on Jacques
Henri Lartigue. In 1968, Avedon travelled to Paris to edit the publication of Diary of a Century, a monograph of Lartigue’s photographs which would bring worldwide renown to the latter. In the skilful way
he designed the layout and by revealing the best of Lartigue’s images, Avedon managed to showcase
the photographer’s work in relation to 20th century as a whole - well beyond the Belle Époque (that
European golden age at the turn of the century before World War I), for which Lartigue had primarily
been known until then.
A magazine : Egoïste
Richard Avedon spent many years working with the French magazine Egoïste, which gave pride of
place to the arts, literature, performance, theatre and dance through a mix of reports, advertisement,
portraits and fashion photographs which graced its pages. With Egoïste, Avedon gave full expression
to a style of photography inspired by other art forms.
The exhibition outlining Avedon’s France thus follows the twists and turns of the photographer’s
extraordinary career through French culture: from an idealised version of Paris in Funny Face, the
story rewinds to a fresh take on the Belle Époque in Diary of a Century, before fast-forwarding to
1991 in Egoïste, with the Volpi Ball in Venice - a collection of photographs illustrating the decline of
the Proustian «old world».
Exposition
La France d’Avedon
Vieux monde, New Look
(Avedon’s France : Old World, New Look)
18 October 2016 I 26 February 2017
BnF I François-Mitterrand library
Quai François Mauriac, Paris 13th arrondissement FRANCE
Tuesdays to Saturdays 10am-7pm
Sundays 1pm-7pm
Closed on Mondays and public holidays
Admission: €9, concession: €7
Bookings through FNAC on +33(0)892 684 694 (€0.34 after tax/min. from France) and www.fnac.com
Curators
Robert M. Rubin
Marianne Le Galliard
Exhibition design
David Adjaye
Publication
Exhibition Catalogue, available in French and English
Published by Editions de la BnF
Contacts presse
Claudine Hermabessière, Head of the Media Partnerships and Press Department
[email protected] - +33 (0)1 53 79 41 18 - +33 (0)6 82 56 66 17
Isabelle Coilly, Press Officer
[email protected] - +33 (0)1 53 79 40 11
Exhibition with the support of 4
Avedon’s France : Old World, New Look
Iconography available for the purposes of the exhibition’s promotion
Iconography of the Richard Avedon Foundation
The 6 pictures below are available only as part of the promotion of the exhibition « La France d’Avedon, Vieux monde, new look» at the BnF, October 18, 2016 to February 26, 2017.
Images may not be cropped or manipulated in any way. Images must maintain their original black border if included in the file
No text may appear over any part of the photographs (including the white background).
The publication of these images is not allowed on social networks.
Appropriate caption, credit and copyright must be published with each image : Photograph(s) by Richard Avedon © The Richard Avedon Foundation
Audrey Hepburn, actrice sur le plateau de Funny
Face, Paris, 1956
Photographie Richard Avedon
© The Richard Avedon Foundation
Yves Montand et Simone Signoret, acteurs, New York,
23 octobre 1959
Photographie Richard Avedon
© The Richard Avedon Foundation
Audrey Hepburn, Mel Ferrer et Buster Keaton dans
« Paris Pursuit » pour Harper’s Bazaar, Paris, 9 août
1959
Photographie Richard Avedon
© The Richard Avedon Foundation
Catherine Deneuve, actrice, Los Angeles,
22 septembre 1968
Photographie Richard Avedon
© The Richard Avedon Foundation
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François Truffaut et Jean-Pierre Léaud, réalisateur et
acteur, Paris, 20 juin 1971
Photographie Richard Avedon
© The Richard Avedon Foundation
Jeanne Moreau, actrice, Paris, 26 juillet 1962
Photographie Richard Avedon
© The Richard Avedon Foundation
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Iconography Harper’s Bazaar
The 3 pictures below are available only as part of the promotion of the exhibition.
Images may not be cropped or manipulated in any way.
Appropriate caption, credit and copyright must be published with each image : « Photograph by Richard Avedon. © The Richard Avedon Foundation / Credit : Previously published by Harper’s Bazaar magazine. Reprinted with permission of Hearst Communications, Inc. »
Harper’s Bazaar, mars 1959 : Marc Chagall, Francis Poulenc, François Mauriac. Photograph by Richard Avedon.
© The Richard Avedon Foundation
Credit : Previously published by Harper’s Bazaar magazine. Reprinted with permission of Hearst Communications, Inc.
Harper’s Bazaar, mars 1960, pp. 176-7 : Simone Signoret et Yves Montand. Photograph by Richard Avedon. © The Richard Avedon Foundation
Credit : Previously published by Harper’s Bazaar magazine. Reprinted with permission of Hearst Communications, Inc.
Harper’s Bazaar, septembre 1960, pp. 194-5: François Truffaut, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Alain Resnais, Claude Chabrol. Photograph by Richard Avedon © The Richard Avedon Foundation
Credit: Previously published by Harper’s Bazaar magazine. Reprinted with permission of Hearst Communications, Inc.
Iconography from Jacques Henri Lartigue Donation
The 2 pictures below are available only as part of the promotion of the exhibition.
Images may not be cropped or manipulated in any way.
Appropriate caption, credit and copyright must be published with each image : « La France d’Avedon. Vieux monde, New Look » du 18 octobre 2016 au 26 février 2017. Bibliothèque nationale de France. As well as the captions and credits below.
« Travail de Dick Avedon pour mon livre Diary of a
Century », consignes d’Avedon pour le retoucheur, page
d’album 0046R49, album, 1949.
Photographie JH Lartigue
© Ministère de la Culture - France / AAJHL
Richard Avedon, New York, novembre 1966.
Photographie JH Lartigue
© Ministère de la Culture - France / AAJHL
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Forward
Avedon’s France — rather than Avedon and France — was chosen for the title of this exhibition because Avedon’s France is a country with its own special geography. It was not exactly invented, but
rather reinvented, out of the postwar ruins of its interwar avant-gardes, packaged for middlebrow
America by magazines like Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and The New Yorker. The Christian Dior show of
1947 —immediately dubbed “the New Look” — was Ground Zero. Marcel Proust and la belle époque
would be thrown into the mix, and remixed. Hence “Old World, New Look.”
French culture underpins virtually all of Avedon’s art. Even before he actually set foot on French
soil, his formative years were spent learning from, and then working for, Alexey Brodovitch, the art
director of Harper’s Bazaar who had lived and worked in Paris between the wars. Twice a year, beginning in 1947, Avedon would accompany Carmel Snow, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, to Paris.
Paris editor Marie Louise Bousquet, took Avedon under her wing and into her Thursday salon.
France is where he returned in the late sixties to rebuild his vision, through a collaboration with
Jacques Henri Lartigue, after the critical failure of Nothing Personal (1964), his second photobook.
And France is where he returned to collaborate with Nicole Wisniak for her magazine Egoïste in the
eighties, after his lucrative but artistically suffocating stint at Vogue.
Following Avedon’s own French itinerary, “Old World, New Look” is a photography exhibition about
a movie – Funny Face—, a book – Diary of a Century – and a magazine – Egoïste. Each of these three
sections of the exhibition emphasizes a different aspect of the hybridity of Avedon’s photographic
practices.
In its multimedia presentations, its emphasis on artistic process and experimentation,”Old World,
New Look,” looking through the lens of his successive engagements with France, strengthens Avedon’s position as one of the main figures of late twentieth century visual culture, and one of the
progenitors of the visual culture of the early twenty first.
« This is precisely how and where photography begins : in Paris, in this daylight, with an 8x10, in such
a studio - a miniature version of the gritty romantic places that Nadar had worked in, and Daguerre
before him. I wanted to use that frame and history as a reference for pictures that were new...»
Richard Avedon
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Exhibition path
« I lit each restaurant, each street as if I were lighting a movie. »
Richard Avedon
COUP DE FOUDRE
Funny Face
Before Avedon ever set foot in Paris, the City of Light had been — to
paraphrase the model Dorian Leigh — a beautiful picture in his head. For
twenty years, Avedon’s photographs in Harper’s Bazaar would be instrumental in refashioning a new, imagined Paris out of the remains of the
old city. Stanley Donen’s Funny Face was a tour d’horizon of Avedon’s
technical innovations in pursuit of this “New Look.” The film, based loosely on Avedon’s career, also added to his burgeoning reputation as
“the most famous photographer in the world.”
In Funny Face, the look of fashion photography and its tricks of the
trade are injected into the widescreen Hollywood musical. Focusing in
detail on the conception of the film, “Old World, New Look,” extracts
what is Avedon from it, and presents his contribution in both still (the famous Audrey Hepburn
“freeze frames”) and moving image (the opening credit sequence) formats. Finally, we have
sourced an absolutely original Mutoscope photobooth for the show like the one Avedon used to make
his famous photobooth portraits. The tiny jewel of a portrait of Hepburn, Mel Ferrer, and Truman
Capote which also features in this section is a delicate counterpoint to the extravagant large
format reproductions from the movie.
© The Richard Avedon Foundation
Made in France / Paris Pursuit
The first part of the exhibition focusing on Avedon’s relationship with cinema is supplemented
by two small rooms. The exhibition area called Made in France – the title of a book published in
2001 on Avedon’s fashion studio photographs in the Fifties – focuses on the links between fashion
photography and Harper’s Bazaar. At the center of the room, are engraver’s prints annotated by
Avedon. Providing a real immersion in Harper’s Bazaar’s universe, this section reveals the extent
to which the French culture promoted by his ‘teachers’, Carmel Snow and Alexey Brodovitch, was
important to Avedon.
The section called Paris Pursuit is dedicated to the relationship
between fashion and cinema. While Avedon did not venture further
into Hollywood after Funny Face, cinematic themes continued to pervade his work. The cover of Harper’s Bazaar in September 1959 credits Avedon as the director of “Paris Pursuit: a Love Farce” – a kind
of ciné-roman with Audrey Hepburn, Mel Ferrer and Buster Keaton in
Paris.
© The Richard Avedon Foundation
This fashion sequence published in the magazine and the photographs
on the set of Funny Face close the first part of the exhibition focusing
on the beginning of Avedon’s career, from 1946 to 1959.
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« It is the faces of others which teach me what mine is like. »
Richard Avedon
FRENCH PORTRAITS
At the core of the exhibition, famous and large-format portraits are presented next to less known
images. Coco Chanel, Jean Cocteau, Picasso, Jean Genet, René Clair, Bernard Buffet, Catherine
Deneuve, Isabelle Adjani, Anouk Aimée, and Jeanne Moreau are among the many personalities
whose portraits illustrate Avedon’s interest in and attachment to French culture.
Some of these portraits are part of Avedon’s first monograph,
Observations (1959), with texts by the writer Truman Capote.
At the center of this exhibition area, several vitrines present an
array of process materials: numerous contact prints; preliminary
prints, fashion images, ads, and book dummies such as the one for
Observations, with the original handwritten notes by Truman
Capote. The visitor will also discover 1947 ‘New Look’ images
- Countess Maxime de la Falaise for instance – followed by
contact prints taken twenty years later with her daughter Loulou;
drawings for sets and costumes by Christian Bérard for the play
© The Richard Avedon Foundation
La Folle de Chaillot and for the photo album of the
Countess of Castiglione, which, now in the Musée d’Orsay, was in Richard Avedon’s private
collection. The large-format cover of Egoïste showing Sister Emmanuelle establishes a continuity
between the portraits of French personalities taken by Avedon between 1950 and 1970 and the
ones made later for Egoïste. These portraits from the eighties bear witness to the importance of
the successive encounters with France that marked the photographer’s career.
LARTIGUE: DIARY OF A CENTURY
«Lartigue had to wait until his first exhibition, and the publication in America of Diary of a Century,
a book I edited, for him to achieve real recognition in France. Maybe it takes a foreigner to discover someone else’s national treasure. »
Richard Avedon
« Richard Avedon! The one I have admired for so many years as the greatest photographer in the world. Bea Feitler, the editor-in-chief of Bazaar, which for three or four dozens of years has been stroking my enthusiasm. Both come to Paris for me! To choose my photographs. To see them all with them, with their new eyes, their eyes which see so well.» Journal of Jacques Henri Lartigue, handwritten entry dated May 1968.
Richard Avedon and Jacques Henri Lartigue met for the first time in November 1966, in Avedon’s
studio in New York. Immediately, Avedon found himself under the lights for Lartigue, and leaped
into a pose that was just like the poses Lartigue’s first subjects took at the beginning of the century. In May 1968, during the process of creating Diary, Avedon and Bea Feitler worked in Lartigue’s
Paris apartment while riots erupted in the streets below.
In the making of Diary of a Century, we see how Avedon approached a photobook. “Old World, New
Look” makes an important contribution to ongoing Lartigue scholarship by identifying the crucial
and little understood role Avedon played in producing and editing the book, and exploring what it
meant for both his and Lartigue’s careers.
Avedon, as a ‘producer’ is connected to the international acknowledgment of Lartigue in 1970 as
the book presents for the first time ever Lartigue’s photographic work over the entire century,
and not simply the work of a photographic naïf, a merely nostalgic souvenir of la belle époque. The
double pages of the book deconstructed and pinned up directly on the exhibition wall show how
Richard Avedon applied Brodovitch’s principles to his work on Lartigue: the importance of the visual
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Photographie JH Lartigue
© Ministère de la Culture - France / AAJHL
narrative, constructed with pauses and shifts in pacing,
blocks of text, and elements of surprise. A projection of
the French photographer’s album pages sheds light on
the book as a work in progress before the final editorial
project. The two copies of the book, which Avedon and
Lartigue respectively signed by to each other, are presented together for the first time.
Avedon’s involvement in Diary of a century shows us
the capital importance he placed on bookmaking in the
construction of his oeuvre, and his role as the “producer” of Lartigue in giving a new look to the proustian old
world.
EGOÏSTE
« Egoïste is the only magazine in the world to give me completely free expression. »
Richard Avedon
In 1985, Avedon began working for Egoïste, where his work would be fearlessly experimental. He
appeared in nine issues of the magazine between 1985 and 2004, portraying some of France’s (and
Europe’s) most provocative figures — such as François Pinault, “Danny the Red” Cohn-Bendit, and
John Galliano — along with such surprising subjects as Abbé Pierre, Sister Emmanuelle, and the
winemaking team at Château Lafite.
Finally, in his work for Egoïste, we see Avedon blazing new trails across the intersecting landscapes of editorial and fine art photography as he photographs a changing Europe: the Volpi Ball,
Checkpoint Charlie, the Parisian banlieue of Drancy.
Before entering the exhibition room dedicated to Egoïste, visitors are welcome by the images of
the Volpi Ball, a series Avedon realized in 1991 in Venice of a tired European aristocracy. This is the
“last gasp” of the Old Europe of Avedon’s beloved Proust and Lartigue. In the same room, two films
allow us to understand the artist’s creative process: a film shot by the photographer Hiro during
the exhibition installation at the Smithsonian Institute (Washington) in 1962, showing Avedon pinning up his prints directly on the walls; then footage from an unproduced film by the renowned
cinéma-vérité filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker during a presentation of Avedon photographs at the
advertising agency McCann Erickson (New York) in 1964.
The Egoïste gallery of French portraits (Marguerite Duras, Gérard Depardieu, Yannick Noah,
Françoise Sagan, Sylvie Guillem, Isabelle Adjani…) illustrates the major importance of dance, literature and performance in Avedon’s work.
The exhibition closes with the presentation of Kate’s Story, a remarkable photo-roman of a deadly
ménage à trois which, in its use of plus-size models, is also a prescient exploration of the stereotypes of female beauty that Avedon was so adept at unpacking and remixing.
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Layout
© Adjaye Associates
The exhibition’s layout was made by the English architect David Adjaye who realized the Whitechapel Idea Store in London (2006) and the National Museum of African History and Culture, in Washington DC. He also worked on the layout of exhibitions about Chris Ofili, Olafur Eliasson (2005 Venice Biennale) and Richard Prince at the BnF in 2011.
COUP DE FOUDRE
The first exhibition room dedicated to the film Funny Face, is a rotunda made of curved picture rails suspended nearly five metres high. The two small rooms, Made in France and Paris Pursuit, are also round and tall These three spaces are connected together through narrow and lower passages.
FRENCH PORTRAITS
This square-shaped room is made of straight picture rails suspended at 4.80 m. The area allows visitors to have the necessary distance to admire the large-format photographs.
LARTIGUE: Diary of a century
This is a triangular space with picture rails suspended at 4.80 m and a canopy sloping ceiling. EGOÏSTE
The first room - the same shape as the Lartigue room – is dedicated to the photographs of the Volpi Ball. The second one, with the portraits published in Egoïste, is similar to the area dedicated to the French portraits, but cosier, with a vellum rounded ceiling.
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Artist Biography
Richard Avedon was born in 1923 in New York. He is considered one of the major American photographers of the second half of the 20th century. Famous from the beginning of his career for his
fashion photographs, he went on to develop over more than half a century an outstanding body of
work anchored in portraiture but ranging far beyond it.
Richard Avedon was 10 years old when he was given his first camera, a Rolleiflex. After a short
period at Columbia University, he began his career in 1942 joining the merchant navy as a photographer. In 1944, he was discovered by Alexey Brodovitch who taught him at the New School for
Social Research in New York; then, quickly, in 1946, he started working for the famous magazine
Harper’s Bazaar. In a few years, he would become the magazine’s leading photographer, mentored
by the editor, Carmel Snow, and Brodovitch, its artistic director. Breaking with the studio tradition,
he poses his models outside, in motion, in city streets. Spontaneity, movement and vitality are the
hallmarks of his fashion images. During his collaboration with Harper’s Bazaar, he made portraits
of celebrities which he would gather in his first monograph, Observations, in 1959, with a text by
Truman Capote. A second photobook, Nothing Personal, followed in 1964, this time with text by
James Baldwin.
In 1966, Avedon left Harper’s Bazaar and worked at Vogue magazine until 1990. While continuing
his portraiture and commercial work, he became increasingly involved in Vietnam-era politics,
producing several works on the war, and an ambitious series ‘The Family’ for Rolling Stone in 1976
consisting of sixty nine portraits of American public figures. In 1979, he launched his ambitious
project on the American West, which led in 1985, after six years of work, to the publication of In
the American West.
In 1992, Avedon became the first photographer of The New Yorker; at the same time, he continued
to work for the French magazine Egoïste, with whom he had started to collaborate in the mid-Eighties.
Richard Avedon died in 2004. At the time, He was working on a project entitled ‘On Democracy,’
around the presidential elections. This project was presented at the Rencontres d’Arles in 2008.
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The Louis Roederer Foundation, patron of the exhibition
« Turning an exhibition dedicated to Richard Avedon into a reality was a dream come true for the
Louis Roederer Foundation, with its close ties to the world of Champagne. Everything about this
project sparkles: the people (such as the irresistible and irreplaceable Audrey Hepburn!); beauty,
not a hieratic form of beauty, but a reinvented beauty, so close that we can almost touch it; fashion,
but a smooth, flowing, endearing form of fashion, far-removed from those stick-thin models looking down at us from the catwalk; and throughout it all there is the sharp eye of Avedon whose
Epicureanism brings his technical expertise to life.
This exhibition depicting a glorious yet bygone France, which will run at the BnF for five months,
pays tribute to the most “fertile” of friendships, that of Richard Avedon for an incredible aesthete Nicole Wisniak, Director of Egoïste magazine. We share this deep admiration for Wisniak. It is also
a tribute to Bruno Racine, who sought to retrace, in Tolbiac, the incredible journey of the tireless
promoter of Lartigue. We would also like to express our delight that the «Vieux Monde, New Look»
exhibition is curated by Robert M. Rubin, a dear friend and a very cultivated patron, as well as by
Marianne Le Galliard, who was awarded the Louis Roederer research grant for her outstanding
work on the Harper’s Bazaar photography archives. »
Michel Janneau, General Secretary of the Louis Roederer Foundation
About Louis Roederer
Founded in 1776 in Reims, Louis Roederer is an independent family-run champagne house managed by Frédéric Rouzaud. In addition to producing Louis Roederer and Cristal champagnes, Louis
Roederer also owns Deutz champagne, Château Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande (Grand
cru classé de Pauillac), Château Haut-Beauséjour and Château de Pez (Saint-Estèphe) and Maison
Descaves, in Bordeaux; Domaines Ott* in Provence, Delas Frères in the Rhone valley, Roederer
Estate, Scharffenberger and the Anderson estate in California, and Porto Ramos Pinto in Portugal.
http://www.louis-roederer.com
Louis Roederer, a Major Patron of Culture and Arts, created the “Louis Roederer Foundation” for
Contemporary Art in 2011 in order to provide structure and sustainability to the patronage policy
that the House has implemented since 2003, working together with prestigious cultural institutions and both confirmed and emerging artists. http://www.louis-roederer.com/fr/foundation
PRESS CONTACT
L’art en plus - 0033 (0)1 45 53 62 74
Olivia de Smedt - [email protected]
Virginie Burnet - [email protected]
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The RATP is proud to be associated with the BnF retrospec�ve “Avedon’s France: Old world, new
look. It is dedicated to Richard Avedon, iconic ar�st of the second half of the twen�eth century who
maintained close �es with France. Through its camera, we not only rediscover the Post War Paris, but
also the greatest icons of cinema, fashion and dance, expressing in original manner.
Eager to offer to its passengers access to this profuse work, the RATP launches from the 18th of
October on its subway network a specific exhibi�on en�tled “The RATP invites Richard Avedon”.
Made up of 44 photographs, including 27 exclusive this show is based on three topics: Cinema
portraits, Dance and movement, Avedon in Paris. Oversized prints will be displayed in an excep�onal
scenography in the following sta�ons:
- Bir-Hakeim g
- Gare de Lyon p
- Hôtel de Ville a
- Jaurès f
- La Chapelle b
- Luxembourg b
- Madeleine p
- Nanterre Université a
- Pyramides p
- Saint Denis Porte de Paris o
- Saint Michel e
Robert M. Rubin, curator of the BnF exhibi�on, highlights that “Richard Avedon would have liked
the idea of a parallel exhibi�on in the subway. He always tried to add a theatrical touch in his
installa�ons: gigan�c enlargement, funny collages, surprising juxtaposi�ons, and, just as it is doing here,
unexpected exhibi�on loca�ons.”
Because it is a local art accessible, and popular allowing to reinforce the dialogue between
passengers, photography is at the heart of the RATP’s cultural policy. From 2013, the RATP has been
associated with large Parisian exhibi�ons as part of the events “RATP invites” in order to enrich
commuters ‘experience on its network. From new talents to renowned ar�sts, the displayed
photographs are o en complementary to the current exhibi�on. Moreover to opens a window over
the world, invi�ng both to escape and contemplate.
Contacts
+33 1 58 78 37 37
www.ratp.fr – [email protected]
www.twitter.com/GroupeRATP
www.facebook.com/RATPofficiel
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