At the Carnavalet Museum in Paris, the Parisian wanderings of Agnès Varda

We thought we knew everything about Agnès Varda (1928-2019), given the exhibitions and retrospectives that have proliferated over the past ten years. But the fame achieved by the artist, who died in 2019, first as a filmmaker and then as a visual artist, has obscured a whole aspect of her work: her beginnings as a photographer. At the Musée Carnavalet, an original and delightful exhibition, centered on Agnès Varda's relationship with the city of Paris, featuring 130 period prints and previously unseen documents from Agnès Varda's archives, provides an opportunity to discover her unique and free-spirited perspective, which blends fantasy with a much darker strangeness.

From 1951 At the time of her death, Agnès Varda lived at the same address, at 86 rue Daguerre (a providential name for a photographer), in the ^14th arrondissement . Rather than an apartment, she had persuaded her father to buy her what was at the time a slum, with no heating and an outside toilet: two shops and their outbuildings, separated by a courtyard. The exhibition reconstructs and revives this picturesque place that became both her home and a central point in her work – a workshop, a shooting studio for friends and actors, a filming location, even an exhibition space.

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