In Paris, there are streets and alleys, facades and faces. And then there is Rue Daguerre, not as an address but as a world, a studio, a playground for the curious eye of Agnès Varda. The Musée Carnavalet is dedicating a surprising exhibition to the exhibition, which runs until August 24, 2025: “The Paris of Agnès Varda, here and there,” accompanied by a book.
The exhibition, constructed as a journey through her images, films, and objects, pays homage to the photographer she was before becoming the celebrated filmmaker. A rich and sensitive journey through the filmmaker’s still too little-known photographic work, where the capital becomes a mirror, a setting, and a raw material. From photography to cinema, from documentary to fiction, from reality to poetry, Agnès Varda has crisscrossed Paris as she has shaped her art: in freedom.
“I don’t live in Paris, I live in the 14th arrondissement of Paris,” said Varda. The common thread of this walk is an address: 86 rue Daguerre, Paris 14th. Here we rediscover the beginnings of a young woman who, in the 1950s, settled at 86 rue Daguerre, transformed two decrepit boutiques into a creative workshop. This now legendary place is more than an address: it is the anchor point of a life, a daily laboratory of visual and narrative experiments. It was there that she photographed her first models—neighbors, actors, friends. It was there, above all, that a vision was invented: a raw setting, natural light, an intimacy. Varda began as a photographer, artisanal and intuitive, somewhere between CAP and darkroom. She mounted her first exhibition in the courtyard in 1954, like others planting cabbages.
Rue Daguerre isn’t just a refuge. It becomes the gravitational center of a free work. Everything is there, in this house of creation and memory, which over time has become a studio, a stage, a character. The exhibition explores all its facets: 130 prints, most of them previously unseen, film clips, objects, documents, her work for advertising and the press, and installations. It’s easy to understand why the filmmaker readily defined herself as a “daguerreotype,” a feminine nod to the pioneers of photography.
But if Rue Daguerre is the heart, Paris is the entire body. Through her images, Varda captures a living, unexpected city. Her theater photographs, taken for Jean Vilar’s TNP, reveal a working-class, inhabited Paris. There are also the artists she meets and photographs with humor and mischief: Alexander Calder in front of his studio, Fellini posed amidst the rubble of an old fortification at the Portes de Vanves, Brassaï in front of a decrepit wall… Agnès Varda brings them into her theater of everyday life, diverts them from prestige to reintegrate them into a living, imperfect city, full of rough edges. With Varda, there is always a way of displacing reality, of derailing it. Everyday life becomes a playground, familiar faces become its actors.
And then there’s the self-portrait, omnipresent without ever being frontal. Agnès Varda appears everywhere: in reflection, in silhouette, as a figure from behind. She plays with her own image, plays with her small frame, her bobbed haircut, her air that’s both serious and hammy. She doesn’t portray herself as a legend but as a fictional character within her own setting, shaped by decades of love and creation.
The photographs are often in dialogue with extracts from films shot in the capital: Cléo de 5 à 7, of course, where the journey of a woman in Paris embraces the anguish of illness and existential turmoil; Les Fiancés du pont MacDonald, a burlesque pastiche with Godard and Anna Karina, shot on the banks of the Canal de l’Ourcq; or L’Opéra-Mouffe, an unclassifiable short film, made while she was pregnant, which reveals the marked faces of the inhabitants of the Mouffetard district. The exhibition weaves these links between photo and film, revealing the unity of a gaze.
“It’s wonderful to film people, to show them the film, and for them to be happy. It’s a testimony to the neighborhood where I live. I’m not a person of the past; I happen to live in an old neighborhood. Where we are, we can bear witness to existence.” – Agnès Varda talks about the film “Daguerreotypes,” dedicated to her neighbors in the 14th arrondissement.
If Agnès Varda is a filmmaker, she is also a social commentator, a feminist of reality. Throughout the exhibition rooms, the extent to which the image, for Varda, is always a matter of connection. A connection between places and people, between memories and gestures, between the sensitive and the political. She remains faithful to this attention to the fragment, to this taste for detail.
“Agnès Varda’s Paris”is a generous and subtle exhibition. By focusing on her Parisian roots, it reveals the thousand faces of a life’s work, woven with freedom, tenderness, and impertinence. It reminds us that the city is a movie set, a family album, an artist’s studio. That we can wander here and there. That looking is already an act of creation.
