Meiselas and Franck reopen the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

The Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson at 79 rue des Archives in Paris closed on 5 October to install its new season. It reopened on Wednesday 21 October with two exhibitions, both on view until 7 March 2027. One ticket covers both.

Susan Meiselas: Nicaragua, History, Memory

Susan Meiselas first went to Nicaragua in 1978, when she was 30. She stayed from June 1978 to July 1979, photographing the popular uprising as it turned into a revolutionary war. The best-known picture from that time is Molotov Man, taken in 1979 outside the National Guard headquarters in Estelí: a Sandinista with a bottle in his hand. Her photographs then went their own way. They turned up on murals, posters, stamps, T-shirts and matchboxes, and her name rarely travelled with them. Years later she went back to find the people in her pictures and to ask what the images had come to mean to them.

The exhibition covers both stages, the insurrection and the later work on memory. It brings together more than a hundred works, documents and film extracts. It is curated by Clément Chéroux, the foundation's director, and carries the Bicentenaire de la photographie label from the French Ministry of Culture, according to Arts in the City.

Martine Franck: Images, Press and Feminist Struggles

The second show presents photographs by Martine Franck (1938–2012), most of them never shown before. They were taken mainly in Paris in the 1970s, close to the Mouvement de libération des femmes. They include women's liberation gatherings, a commemoration of the women of the Paris Commune and the Women's March for Equality on Fifth Avenue in 1971. In 1972, before she joined Magnum, Franck co-founded the Viva agency. In 2003 she set up the foundation itself, together with Henri Cartier-Bresson and their daughter. L'Art de la photo names the curator as Angèle Ferrere, who received the foundation's Martine Franck curatorial research grant in 2025.

For the bookshelf

The Meiselas exhibition has an accompanying book published by Atelier EXB. On 5 November at 7 pm the foundation holds a book presentation with Meiselas in its Feuilletage series. On 6 November a conference on the revolution follows at the Maison de l'Amérique latine.

The show also offers a new way into her earlier book, Nicaragua, June 1978–July 1979. Its title covers exactly the months the exhibition starts from. Seeing how those pictures were later reused, and how she followed them up, puts the book in a different light.

The foundation is open Tuesday to Sunday, 11 am to 7 pm. Admission is €10, or €6 at the reduced rate, and free for under-18s.

Sources

• Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson: Accueil, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
• Expos photo Paris automne 2026 : le programme complet, L'Art de la photo
• Expositions Susan Meiselas et Martine Franck à la Fondation HCB, Arts in the City