Like the photo blog about their visitors that came out about the museums of New York, today we dedicate one to the visitors of the museums of Paris, taking advantage of the participation in the Rencontres Web-Musées, which we also write about on the blog. The truth is, a certain amount of time has gone by, and there are so many things to talk about on this blog, that it has stayed on our to-do list. Now that the time for holidays has come, to take and look at photos, we would like to share it with you.

The entry includes three of the major Paris museums: Orsay, Louvre and Pompidou.

As before, I won’t talk about the magnificent collections that are already well known and that museum websites make readily accessible. What interested me was to capture the visitors, their diversity, the informational and access services to these museums, to show how visitors interact with the works - taking photos of them, filming them, listening to explanations with a guide or an audio guide, giving explanations to children, or simply standing spellbound before a masterpiece. And when the opportunity arose to photograph visitors with Picasso’s works, we of course didn’t miss it.

I recommend that you read an article that appeared in the New York Times a year ago titled “At Louvre, Many Stop to Snap but Few Stay to Focus”, an ironic take on lightning-quick visits to museums, meaning, stopping just to take photos.

Actually, in June 2010, the Musée d’Orsay took the controversial decision to prohibit taking photos or filming in its gallery spaces in order to, as they explain, ease the flow of visitors. In the article “Le musée d’Orsay interdit les photos” you’ll find more details. Bans on taking photos have never been well accepted by visitors, which is understandable since, although images of the artworks can be downloaded from the Internet or can be bought, the ability to take a personal photo is quite appealing. In today’s art museums, this is often a complicated issue as, like in our museum, reproduction rights do not belong to the museum but to the artists or the artists’ heirs, in our case, the Picasso Administration. That’s why our visitors can enjoy taking photos of the architectural features of the museum or the visitors, wonderful photos such as these two:

Museu Picasso. Photo: Gallery EstudioBLAU

Museu Picasso. Foto: Gallery de Micke-fi

And you, when you visit museums where you can take photos, do you? And do you upload them to Flickr?

Conxa Rodà

Project Manager