The Musée de l’Homme is presenting, from April 8, 2026, an exhibition devoted to the later stages of human life. Blending art and science, it is the result of the meeting between photographer Nikos Aliagas, who has explored the subject with great subtlety for several decades, and biodemographer Samuel Pavard, a professor at the Muséum and a specialist in aging. It will be held in the Germaine Tillion Foyer until January 3, 2027.
By combining their at once lucid and delicate perspectives on old age as a biological, demographic, and social reality, Samuel Pavard and Nikos Aliagas together bring forth questions about our relationship to time, the place our society gives to later life, and the ties different generations maintain with one another.
The scientific themes advanced by the researcher find a striking echo in the photographs of Nikos Aliagas, who has been photographing the faces of passing time for many years. The images presented in the exhibition were chosen for their ability to make visible what often remains silent: the dignity of aging bodies, the persistence of gestures, the invisible transmission between generations. This work is part of a humanist and anthropological approach, attentive to embodied memory, family ties, and the traces left by life. Through these portraits, Nikos Aliagas questions our collective relationship to age, to long time spans, and to the place we give to elders in our contemporary societies. In intimate scenes, he captures what demographic analysis observes on the scale of society.
The Natural History of Old Age
After first resituating human longevity on the scale of the rest of the living world, the exhibition shows that old age has always been part of human societies. Even when life expectancy was low, particularly because of high infant mortality, it was not uncommon for some individuals to reach, or even exceed, their sixties. Moreover, older people have always played a fundamental role in human societies: caring for grandchildren, passing on material goods and knowledge to subsequent generations, mediating conflicts, or contributing to group decision-making.
Old Age Today
The exhibition then turns to the later stages of life today and the increase in life expectancy, which has reached more than 70 years in the majority of countries in Europe, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. Older people constitute a major public-health and social-policy issue, and they give rise to two opposing representations: that of a happy, active, and useful old age, and that of isolated, dependent, vulnerable people in distress.
And tomorrow?
Will we know how to protect older people from the world’s crises? Heat waves, unprecedented health crises, epidemics of cancer and of chronic or degenerative illnesses caused by pollutants… all these factors cast a growing threat to human health in general, and for the survival of older people in particular. The solutions that must be found to limit human impacts on the climate and on biodiversity are also those that would allow human beings to live long and healthy lives.
“Photographing advanced age means looking time in the face without judging it. Faces, hands, beings that resist the weightlessness of time, like olive trees several centuries old, tell entire lives, silences, invisible transmissions. They remind us that growing old is not an erasure, but another way of being in the world and an intimate way of leaving one’s imprint as a legacy for those who will come after.” – Nikos Aliagas
Born into a Greek family, Nikos Aliagas was born in Paris in 1969. A journalist, he began his professional path at RFI, then Euronews in 1993, before multiplying his experiences on both Greek and French channels (France 2, ERT). Since 2001, he has hosted emblematic TF1 programs such as Star Academy and The Voice, becoming an essential figure in the audiovisual landscape. At the same time, Nikos Aliagas has been a photographer from a very young age. In a powerful, sharply defined, high-contrast black and white, he photographs Greece and the peoples of the sea, childhood, old age, travel, nomadic souls, the sacred, people who work the land, the nostalgia of return, artisans, and artists. His photographs have been the subject of three books and around fifteen exhibitions.
Nikos Aliagas : Les Grands Âges
through January 3, 2027
Musée de l’Homme
17, place du Trocadéro – Paris 16e
www.museedelhomme.fr
