Paris has a quieter August than you might expect. The tourists are here, but the Parisians are largely not. Which means the city’s museums and galleries are calm, unhurried, and genuinely good right now. Here are eight photography exhibitions worth your time before September ends.

Daido Moriyama, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

If you only see one show this summer, make it this one. Moriyama is the Japanese photographer who, in 1972, published a book called Shashin yo sayonara, “Farewell Photography”, in which he deliberately rejected every rule of a “good” photograph. Blurry, badly framed, grainy, dark. The book became a cult object.

This exhibition shows around sixty prints, almost all in black and white, tracing his radical manifesto and his lifelong obsession with photography itself as a subject. A stray dog in the light. Film strips drying on a line. His own reflection in a window. There is also something unexpected: his tribute to the very first photograph ever taken, by Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 in Burgundy. Moriyama made a pilgrimage to the site in 2008. The connection between Tokyo street photography and a French village in 1826 is quietly extraordinary.

Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, 79 rue des Archives, 3rd arr. Tuesday to Sunday, 11am to 7pm. €6 to 10. Until October 4.

Fragile Beauty, Jeu de Paume

Elton John has been collecting photography since 1991. This exhibition brings together 300 prints from his personal collection, spanning the 1950s to today, and the range is genuinely surprising. Irving Penn. Diane Arbus. Robert Mapplethorpe. Richard Avedon’s photograph of Marilyn Monroe, looking dazed. A section on queer desire and joy. And at the end, an installation by Nan Goldin that hits hard. Elton John appears twice: in an extravagant portrait at the entrance, and in a close-up of his hands further in. The collection is not about him. That restraint is what makes it work.

Jeu de Paume, 1 place de la Concorde, 1st arr. Tuesday 11am to 9pm, Wednesday to Sunday 11am to 7pm. €7.50 to 14. Until September 27.

Madeleine de Sinéty, Jeu de Paume

In the same building, a different show entirely, and one that deserves its own visit. Madeleine de Sinéty (1934 to 2011) was an autodidact photographer who was barely exhibited during her lifetime and only properly rediscovered in 2020. This is her first major retrospective. She photographed disappearing worlds: steam trains, old Paris, a farming village in Brittany, the meatpacking district of New York. In the 1970s, when professionals shot almost exclusively in black and white, she worked in colour. She earned the trust of strangers and caught quiet moments without stealing them.

Jeu de Paume, 1 place de la Concorde, 1st arr. Tuesday 11am to 9pm, Wednesday to Sunday 11am to 7pm. €7.50 to 14. Until September 27.

L’Espace Entre Nous, Le Bal

A tightly curated selection of 120 prints from the collection of American producer Michael G. Wilson, 12,000 pieces in total, of which Le Bal chose with real intelligence. The theme is portrait and distance: how close a photographer gets to their subject, and what that distance means. Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Walker Evans, Gregory Crewdson. Dorothea Lange’s 1938 photographs of workers’ hands. A Japanese artist, Shoji Ueda, whose neighbours and friends posed freely on sand dunes. And a self-portrait by Tomoko Sawada, her face transformed into a clock. A beautiful, coherent exhibition that doesn’t try to do too much.

Le Bal, 6 impasse de la Défense, 18th arr. Wednesday 12pm to 8pm, Thursday to Sunday 12pm to 7pm. €6 to 10. Until January 3, 2027.

Nuits Balnéaires, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Running alongside Moriyama at the same foundation: an Ivorian artist whose work is completely different in spirit. Nuits Balnéaires, the name coming from one of his own poems, constructs staged photographs that feel like illustrated folklore. A fisherman-poet with a fish-shaped trunk walks along the Gulf of Guinea coast. He sits at a typewriter, listening for inspiration through a shell. The colours are strong, hibiscus red, deep black, and the symbols are specific to West African traditions, including the Akan culture’s Gye Nyame sign. You don’t need to recognise them to be drawn in.

Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, 79 rue des Archives, 3rd arr. Tuesday to Sunday, 11am to 7pm. €6 to 10. Until October 4.

Robert Capa, Musée de la Libération de Paris

A small but carefully made retrospective of one of the most famous war photographers of the 20th century. The centrepiece is something unusual: the museum’s team watched all the film footage shot during the liberation of Paris on August 25 to 26, 1944, tracking down every appearance of Capa himself at work. The resulting short film is, on its own, worth the trip. The exhibition then traces his full career, from his early photographs of Leon Trotsky in Copenhagen to his final images in Vietnam in 1954, just before he stepped on a landmine. Unpublished prints, personal objects, and a recording of his voice from an American radio broadcast.

Musée de la Libération de Paris, 4 av. Colonel-Henri-Rol-Tanguy, 14th arr. Tuesday to Sunday, 10am to 6pm. €9 to 11. Until December 20.

Julie Glassberg, Carré de Baudouin

Three series, around a hundred photographs, and a consistent argument: that people who don’t fit the mould are worth looking at. The most striking section is a colour series from 2022 to 2023 showing elderly people dancing in Parisian dancings, nightclubs for older adults, under violet and red stage lighting. They are fully present, fully alive. Upstairs, a black-and-white series documents a fringe biker club in the United States between 2009 and 2012. Alongside it, a colour series of Japanese truckers who paint their vehicles in elaborate detail and drive at night. Three communities, zero condescension.

Carré de Baudouin, 121 rue de Ménilmontant, 20th arr. Tue/Wed/Fri/Sat 11am to 6pm, Thu 11am to 8:30pm. Free entry. Until October 3.

La Photographie en Toutes Lettres, MEP

An abecedary, an exhibition organized like an alphabet, pulling from the collection of bank Neuflize OBC. A as in adolescence, with Claudine Doury’s photographs of Russian girls at a former Soviet summer camp in 1994. B as in Burgundy. K as in Kodak, a film on Kodak advertising. The approach is deliberately playful and subjective. Sophie Calle, Bernard Plossu, Sophie Ristelhueber. Claude Cahun’s 1928 mirror self-portrait. It works better than it sounds.

Maison Européenne de la Photographie, 5 to 7 rue de Fourcy, 4th arr. Wed/Fri 11am to 8pm, Thu 11am to 10pm, Sat/Sun 10am to 8pm. €8 to 14. Until September 13. Go soon.

A practical note

Most of these exhibitions have no queue right now, Paris in August is quieter than people expect. The one exception is Jeu de Paume, which can get busy on Thursday evenings. If you want to combine two shows in a single afternoon, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson (Moriyama + Nuits Balnéaires) is a natural pair. And the two Jeu de Paume shows (Elton John + de Sinéty) work well together, one ticket covers both.

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