La Villa Tamaris is now hosting a major retrospective devoted to Bruno Barbey, this essential photographer, bringing together more than 200 prints. The exhibition presents his emblematic series, including Les Italiens and the now-iconic images of May ’68, along with a broad selection of reports produced around the world. Jean-Luc Monterosso, former director of the Maison Européenne de Paris, writes:
The Right Gaze
Apparently classical in form, Bruno Barbey’s work occupies a singular place in the recent history of photography. Widely disseminated in the press and in the most emblematic magazines (Du, Camera, Time, Newsweek, Stern…), his work is nevertheless too often eclipsed by his famous black-and-white reportage on the Italians, produced at the beginning of his career in the first half of the 1960s, as well as by the admirable color images of his native Morocco… Yet whether in photojournalism, in the use of color, or in the singular photographic approach that characterizes him, Bruno Barbey stands as a precursor. Faced with the great events that shook the second half of the twentieth century, he seems by instinct always to have been there at the right moment and before everyone else. He covered the Six-Day War in 1967, the events of May ’68, Vietnam in 1971, China during the Cultural Revolution. He was in Cambodia when Phnom Penh was surrounded by the Khmer Rouge in 1973, and again in Poland at the very beginning of Solidarity. He never ceased to travel the world from the USSR to Africa, from the United States to Japan, from Asia to Latin America. He brought back a harvest of images that became the subject of numerous publications, prefaced by the most illustrious writers: Tahar Ben Jelloun, J.M.G. Le Clézio, and Jean Genet, who, on his return from Palestine, agreed to write a text on his photographs that would cause a scandal.
Jean Luc Monterosso. Former director of the Maison Européenne de Paris.
Bruno Barbey (1941–2020) occupies a major place in the history of humanist photography and international photojournalism. A member of the Magnum Photos agency from 1966, which he would chair from 1992 to 1998, he traveled the world for more than fifty years, bearing witness to the political, social, and cultural upheavals of his time. From Portugal under Salazar to Solidarity-era Poland, from the Middle East to Asia, his images combine documentary rigor with a deeply human gaze. Very early on, Bruno Barbey made color a language in its own right, subtly revealing the atmospheres, tensions, and poetry of reality. In 2016, he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in the photography section.
Curator : Caroline Thiénot Barbey
Scénography : Aurélie Barbey
Bruno Barbey : Visions sur le monde – 1964-2020
March 28 to June 7, 2026
Villa Tamaris TPM
295, avenue de la Grande Maison
83500 La Seyne-sur-Mer
Wednesday to Sunday from 1:30 pm to 6:30 pm, except public holidays
www.villatamaris.fr
