Eternal Paris: Photographing the City of Light

The Paris that exists in our popular imagination was largely shaped by photography. 

Eternal Paris explores how photographers in the 19th and early 20th centuries used the camera to celebrate and preserve the cultural heritage of the City of Light. 

Featuring nearly 50 photographs from our collection, the exhibition traces how photography captured the city’s past and its transformation into a modern metropolis. 

Among the works are early pictures of its famous monuments and the ruins of the Paris Commune of 1871, Eugène Atget’s chronicling of a city on the brink of the modern age, and photographs that hail Paris as a cultural capital and center of artistic life. Together, the works on view reveal how photography crafted an enduring image of Paris in our collective consciousness.​

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website