PAN Exclusive Images
Started in 1938, bequeathed to the City of Paris in 1985 and then awarded for licensing management to Photononstop in 2019 – photo agency Roger-Viollet has now converted their street facing offices into a gallery space.
The Roger-Viollet Gallery will open its doors on December 11th for an exhibition and print sale (NOT vintage prints I have to tell you) entitled ‘Roger-Viollet agency Icons’. 40 Portraits of artists and personalities of the 20th century (from Chirac to Gainsbourg, from Colette to Birkin…) as well as a selection of the agency’s most beautiful archives will be on show in the prestigious premises of the Roger-Viollet agency, well known to Parisians and located at 6 rue de Seine, in the 6th arrondissement.
The final touches are being made to the gallery so at this stage we can only bring you the architects 3D images of the space – as above – and here’s a few images from the show they have shared with PAN:
Roger-Viollet Gallery told PAN: ‘After three months of work, the place dedicated to archival photography retains its soul and now offers, on a surface open to the public of 100 m², a new exhibition space, a space for consultation and sale of prints, and a bookstore corner.’
The Gallery architect, David Apheceix, told PAN: “The new Roger-Viollet gallery gives pride of place to the exhibition and to new ways of consulting the photographic collection. The iconic stacking of modules of green archive boxes is reinterpreted to become the gallery’s layout unit. Regular, they optimise the storage capacity of prints, when irregular they sketch out elements of furniture and multiply the uses. All of them are aligned with the rectangular grid of the floor that connects them and distributes the space. With its neutrality in shades of grey, the frame is placed in the background to highlight the foundation of this institution, the photographs and their storage boxes.”
• For its inauguration, the gallery will present an exhibition entitled Les voyages d’Hélène (“Hélène’s Journeys”), a retrospective of Hélène Roger-Viollet’s photographs taken during her world tours from the mid-1950s to the end of the 1960s. The project, postponed due to the health crisis, will be presented to the public until March 6, 2021.
• Address: 6, rue de Seine 75006 Paris France. Go see and send photos to PAN -thanks [email protected]
• The Roger-Viollet historical collections have been supplemented for more than fifteen years by partnerships with the world’s largest heritage agencies, French and foreign independent photographers and the France-Soir daily newspaper’s collection, distributed exclusively.
Thanks to Gilles Taquet at Photononstop for his help suppling extra details and some translation on this article!
[…] Thanks to PAN reader and ex photo editor Andrea Whittaker who sent us these shots of her visit to the Roger Viollet photo library print gallery in Paris last week reporting – here’s the PAN report on the gallery opening in 2020. […]