Louvre opens Louvre Photo on 4 November 2026
Published on 11/07/2026 at 14:09 | Editorial responsibility: Rafael MĂĽller, Editor-in-Chief AD HOC NEWSPhotography and palace history
- The Louvre presents Louvre Photo from 4 November 2026 under museum direction.
- The exhibition brings more than 300 photographs to the Mezzanine Napoléon and its visitors.
- The Louvre opened as a museum in 1793, before Daguerre photographed it in 1839.
- Paris lists the venue at 99 Rue de Rivoli in the first arrondissement.
At the Louvre (Musée du Louvre) in Paris, Louvre Photo opened on 4 November 2026, turning the museum itself into the subject of a new exhibition. The presentation runs until 3 May 2027 in the Mezzanine Napoléon and links the palace, its collections and its visitors through photography.
Louvre Photo opens with 300 photographs
The exhibition presents more than 300 photographs, spanning the first decades of photography to contemporary images. The Louvre says the selection includes artworks, galleries, visitors, museum workers, hidden spaces and restricted corridors, bringing together photographs made for documentary, scientific, artistic and personal purposes.
The museum organised the exhibition with contributions from several French institutions, including the National Archives, the French National Library, the Musée d’Orsay and Paris Musées. Louvre Photo exhibition dates place the show at the Mezzanine Napoléon from 4 November 2026 to 3 May 2027.
The curators are Dominique de Font-Réaulx, senior curator and adviser to the president-director of the Louvre, and Quentin Bajac, director of the Jeu de Paume. The exhibition is part of the Ministry of Culture’s Photography Bicentenary programme, which runs from 1 September 2026 to 30 September 2027.
How Louvre Photo turns the palace into its subject
The exhibition follows the Louvre as architecture, museum and photographic motif. Its route includes early daguerreotypes, photographs of the Grande Galerie, aerial views, empty rooms, colour processes, wartime records, behind-the-scenes spaces and images of the Mona Lisa.
That structure connects the new exhibition to the building’s own history. The museum opened in 1793, while Louis-Jacques Daguerre made a photograph showing the Louvre’s Pavillon de Flore and the Seine in 1839. The palace therefore appears in the exhibition both as an early photographic subject and as a place repeatedly transformed by later generations.
The press material also identifies the pyramid, dating from 1989, and the Salle des États, where the Mona Lisa has been displayed since 2006, as familiar parts of the museum’s photographic image. Louvre Photo press information describes the exhibition as a study of photographs taken at the Louvre and photographs made of the Louvre.
Visiting Louvre: what travellers from Western Europe should know
- Louvre Photo runs from 4 November 2026 to 3 May 2027 at the Mezzanine Napoléon inside the Louvre.
- The exhibition is included with museum admission, and its subject includes galleries, collections, visitors and areas normally outside public view.
- The Paris venue is listed at 99 Rue de Rivoli in the first arrondissement, placing the exhibition in central Paris.
- The exhibition includes early daguerreotypes, modern digital images, projections, slide films and postcards, so the presentation covers different photographic formats.
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Frequently asked questions about Louvre
When does Louvre Photo take place at the Louvre?
Louvre Photo runs from 4 November 2026 to 3 May 2027 at the Mezzanine Napoléon.
What is Louvre Photo about?
It presents more than 300 photographs of the Louvre, its artworks, galleries, visitors, workers and less visible spaces.
Where is the Louvre and how do you get there?
The museum is at 99 Rue de Rivoli in Paris’s first arrondissement, in central Paris.
