Expo 54 - Agnès Varda

As part of the donation of her collection of prints, contact sheets, and negatives, the Institut pour la photographie wishes to highlight Agnès Varda as a photographer. 

On June 1, 1954, Agnès Varda (1928–2019) opened her first photography exhibition. The event took place in the courtyard of her now-legendary home-studio at 86 Rue Daguerre in Paris’s 14th arrondissement, for her friends and neighbors, including Calder, Hartung, and Brassaï. Hanging directly on the walls and shutters, her prints—carefully glued to hardboard—stood out thanks to thick wooden battens. 

These photographs, taken between 1949 and 1954, already reveal the eye, humor, and sensitivity of the 26-year-old photographer. Armed with her Certificate of Professional Competence (CAP) in photography, earned in 1949, she took photographs using a Rolleiflex or a bellows camera. Staged portraits, daring portraits, composed portraits… This is a journey—blurring the lines between reality and fiction—into the world of Agnès Varda: Paris, Sète, and Pointe Courte; the little Ulysses; Calder; a heart-shaped potato… No scenes from the Théâtre National Populaire, which she had been documenting since 1949, nor photographs of children—which were her means of earning a living at the time— but rather the first elements of a personal photographic style of rare insight, whose images seem to mark the genesis of the—better-known—work of the filmmaker and visual artist she would become. 

While Agnès Varda loved to talk about her three creative lives, her career as a photographer remains largely unknown. By depositing negatives and contact prints at the Institut pour la photographie, her children, Rosalie Varda and Mathieu Demy, invite us to dust off our magnifying glasses to examine the scope of this photographic work produced between the 1940s and 1970s and to reveal its quality and richness. As a prelude to these upcoming studies, this presentation of the 1954 exhibition is complemented by previously unpublished plates and contact prints that shed light on the context in which this first personal and intimate exhibition was produced. 

↘︎ Curating: Carole Sandrin with Rosalie Varda and Sherine El Sayed Taih 

↘︎ With the kind support of: Rosalie Varda and the Nathalie Obadia Gallery

↘︎ Production: Institut pour la photographie