There is something profoundly anti-retrospective in the exhibition dedicated to Agnès Varda, and this is not a paradox but a precise stance. While presented as the first major Italian retrospective devoted to her photographic work, the exhibition deliberately avoids a celebratory, linear format, unfolding instead as a constellation of materials that convey the mobile and elusive nature of her practice.
“Agnès Varda. Qui e là, tra Parigi e Roma”, installation view at Villa Medici – Accademia di Francia, Roma, ph. © Daniele Molajoli, courtesy Villa Medici – Accademia di Francia
Its declared point of departure – the postwar Paris and the courtyard-studio of rue Daguerre – does not function as a mere biographical frame, but as an operative matrix. Rue Daguerre is not simply a place: it is a threshold where life and work, observation and staging, document and fiction interpenetrate until they become indistinguishable. The exhibition insists on this original dimension, resisting any linear chronology. Rather, everything seems to return to that initial core, as if each image were a variation on a single gesture: inhabiting the world through looking.
“Agnès Varda. Qui e là, tra Parigi e Roma”, installation view at Villa Medici – Accademia di Francia, Roma, ph. © Daniele Molajoli, courtesy Villa Medici – Accademia di Francia
The photographs from the 1950s, together with archival materials and film excerpts, make clear that what Varda would later call “cinécriture” is not a late invention but a quality already embedded in her photographic gaze. Each image contains a latent narrative tension, a temporality that exceeds the instant of the shot. It is never about capturing a moment, but about opening it, making it porous. In this sense, Varda’s photography is already cinema, not through formal analogy, but through a shared ethics of seeing grounded in relation. This relational dimension is one of the most significant aspects of the exhibition. The faces that populate her images – friends, artists, passersby, shopkeepers – are never reduced to types. Even when approaching reportage, Varda avoids any sociological drift. Her attention to marginal lives is never a top-down act of representation, but one of proximity. The image does not document: it encounters, exposes itself, allows itself to be traversed.
Agnès Varda, “Self-portrait in front of a painting by Gentile Bellini”, Venezia, 1959 © Succession Agnès Varda
In this sense, her work is deeply intertwined with a reflection on the female gaze. Because her films explored the complexity of women’s inner lives – often filtered through a consciously situated perspective – critics have recognized her as one of the first truly feminist figures in European cinema. Yet this is not a programmatic or ideological feminism, but rather a practice of looking that dismantles representational conventions from within. One inevitably thinks of Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962), her most celebrated film, in which two hours in the life of a singer become the site of a perceptual transformation: from object of the gaze to subject who looks. The waiting for medical results unfolds into a traversal of urban space and, simultaneously, into an awakening of consciousness. This subtle yet radical shift also permeates her photographs: women are never simply seen, but caught in a tension between exposure and self-determination.
“Agnès Varda. Qui e là, tra Parigi e Roma”, installation view at Villa Medici – Accademia di Francia, Roma, ph. © Daniele Molajoli, courtesy Villa Medici – Accademia di Francia
The section devoted to Italy introduces a compelling shift. The images taken between Venice, Bomarzo and Rome in the late 1950s and early 1960s do not merely document a journey; they unsettle the very status of Varda’s gaze. Confronted with a landscape saturated with iconographic memory, the artist seems to oscillate between attraction and resistance. On the one hand, there is a taste for the picturesque and for the graphic construction of the image; on the other, a persistent effort to evade stereotype, to seek a lateral point of view. It is within this tension that the Italian photographs find their strength, as if Varda were continuously negotiating her position within an already heavily codified visual tradition. Particularly emblematic are the photographs taken in Rome in 1963: the portrait of Luchino Visconti and the images from the set of “Contempt” by Jean-Luc Godard. Here too, rather than adhering to the center of the action, Varda places herself at the margins, capturing secondary, interstitial moments. Her gaze does not amplify the spectacle of cinema; it unsettles it, moving through it laterally.
“Agnès Varda. Qui e là, tra Parigi e Roma”, installation view at Villa Medici – Accademia di Francia, Roma, ph. © Daniele Molajoli, courtesy Villa Medici – Accademia di Francia
What emerges is the portrait of an artist who resists any singular definition. Photographer, filmmaker, visual storyteller: categories that prove insufficient to grasp the complexity of a practice that consistently operates through shifts and contaminations. More than a disciplinary identity, what asserts itself is an attitude – a way of looking that always implies a position, a responsibility. In a contemporary context marked by the proliferation and rapid obsolescence of images, Varda’s work retains a rare quality: the ability to slow down vision, to restore density to the visible. The exhibition does not simply retrace an oeuvre; it invites us to engage with a critical stance toward the image itself. And it is perhaps precisely in this persistence, in this quiet resistance, that Varda’s work continues to question the present.
Info:
Agnès Varda. Here and there, between Paris and Rome
02/25/2026 – 5/25/2026
Paris by Agnès Look
curated by Anne de Mondenard, museum Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris.
With the collaboration of the Carnival Museum – History of Paris, Paris Museums and Rosalie Varda.
Italy by Agnès Look
Curated by by Carole Sandrin, Institute for Photography.
Co-produced with the Institute for Photography of the Highlands of France, based on the photographic background and archives of the Agnès Succession Varda
Villa Medici
Viale della Trinità dei Monti, 1 – Roma
villamedici.it
Micol Di Veroli (Rome, 1976) is an art historian, critic and independent curator. She is a member of AICA – International Association of Art Critics. Since 2010 she has been curator of Glocal Project Consulting and collaborates with several international museums creating projects aimed at promoting and supporting Italian art abroad.
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