Entrusting the keys to its intimacy to eighteen eyes still in training is a wager that few century-old institutions dare to make. The Ritz Paris has done so for Paris Photo 2026, opening its doors to students of the Photo-Video department at Gobelins Paris, whose new works will be exhibited in the hotel from 13 to 16 November.
The chosen format, the carte blanche, implies a trust rarely granted by a house so steeped in history: letting a new generation of authors freely explore the heritage, aesthetics and symbols of a place, without dictating in advance how it should be read. The eighteen students thus enjoyed rare access to the intimacy of the hotel on Place Vendôme, each developing a singular point of view: some chose to reveal the backstage and the invisible teams who bring the House to life every day, others preferred to elevate its architectural and decorative heritage, and still others questioned what luxury evokes today for a generation born with social networks and the instant image.
This diversity of approaches is no accident: it reflects a precise way of understanding the role of photography in a place as photographed as the Ritz Paris, where the most expected image — that of the façade, the salon or the chandelier — gives way here to more personal readings, between blur and movement, interior sky or minutely observed detail, to borrow the titles of some of the works presented. Where a professional photographer commissioned for the occasion might have sought to seduce from the outset, the freshness of the student gaze introduces a form of acknowledged hesitation, of visible groping, which changes the very nature of what is shown of a palace: no longer a communication image but a sincere attempt to understand what this place represents, experienced from the inside for the duration of the project.
This collaboration is part of what is already a long photographic history for the establishment: for more than 125 years, the Ritz Paris has maintained a singular bond with the great figures of creation, from Richard Avedon to Annie Leibovitz by way of Robert Doisneau, Elliott Erwitt, Roxane Lowit or Brassaï. As early as 1922, Man Ray made a series of portraits there, including that of the Marchesa Casati, considered one of the very first Surrealist photographs in the history of art — a legacy that gives this student carte blanche a particular resonance, that of placing a new generation in a lineage begun a century earlier.
For Gobelins Paris, a school with more than sixty years of photography teaching behind it, this exercise belongs to a pedagogy through real-life experience: confronting students with a demanding commission, in a place charged with symbols and responsibilities, before they join careers in which craftsmanship, art direction and brand image will have to coexist permanently. The exhibition, presented with free admission in the hotel’s peristyle, thus closes the loop of a transmission that, for once, runs not from master to pupil, but from the institution to those who will write, tomorrow, its next visual history.
What remains, implicitly, is a question that this exhibition raises without settling: what can the photography of a place already photographed a thousand times still reveal, already recounted a thousand times by those who have visited it, lived in it or simply dreamed of it from Place Vendôme? The answer perhaps lies less in the images themselves than in the gesture of putting the question to very young authors rather than to established names — a wager on the fresh gaze rather than on the certainty of the result, in a house that could be content with its already written iconography.
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