Under the Louvre Pyramid, a 1989 black and white photograph

Louvre escalator under the Pyramid, 1989 – Photo © Sebastien Desnoulez

Under the Louvre Pyramid, 1989

In the late 1980s, the Louvre Museum had just opened its new entrance beneath the glass Pyramid. It is 1989. I am riding up the escalator among the visitors, a Nikon F without prism around my neck. I press the camera downwards so that the strap around my neck is pulled tight and stabilises it. With my Nikon 24 mm f/2.8 Ai-S, I choose a slow shutter speed around 1/15 s or 1/8 s, accepting that blur will be part of the image. I focus, compose and frame directly on the Nikon F’s focusing screen, with the prism removed. A single photograph, an instinctive composition, which would nonetheless become one of my favourite images from the very first development.

Composition: diagonals, sharpness and blur

The focus is deliberately set on the back and arm of the person in front of me on the escalator. They become the anchor point of the image, the only truly sharp presence in a moving world. Around them, silhouettes begin to slide: people on the opposite escalator, visitors in the hall, the architecture itself, slightly softened by the slow shutter speed.

The diagonal lines of the handrails structure the image and lead the eye towards the top of the frame, where two blurred figures seem to emerge from behind the foreground. You can sense a conversation, an exchange, a fragment of a story that the photograph does not show but simply suggests. The viewer does not get all the answers and must project themselves, imagine their own narrative.

In black and white, the scene becomes more straightforward. The tonal range emphasises the contrast between the geometric structure of the Pyramid and the fluid movement of the silhouettes. The film grain recalls the era of the shot and gives the image a particular texture. Graphic and powerful, this photograph is a good summary of the way I work: capturing an instant, offering a kind of synthesis of a place or a moment, with a strong visual dimension, without necessarily tying it to a larger assignment or series.

From darkroom print to digitisation

At the time, I made an 18×24 cm print on Ilford Multigrade paper, with a white border and the edge of the negative as a thin black line. That print was already one of my favourites, hanging in my staircase; I had scanned it in low resolution for the very first website I built when I discovered HTML in 1999. For a long time, I did not have a digitisation method I was really happy with and quite simply lacked the time to scan all those images.

The arrival of the Nikon Z8 changed everything. Its dynamic range allows me to create a true digital equivalent of the negative and then “develop” it in Lightroom, as I would in the darkroom, but with far more precise control. I can recover the original intention, correct the excessive contrast of the old print and explore new interpretations, while still respecting the spirit of the film capture.

To digitise my negatives, I now prefer copying them with a digital camera rather than using a scanner. This approach offers more flexibility, better optical control and fits naturally into my workflow. I explain the whole method in a dedicated article: Digitising black and white negatives with a camera and developing them in Lightroom (in French). There you will find my setup, the equipment I use and how I process the files in Lightroom to get the most out of black and white film.

From film to digital, a continuity

Coming back to this Louvre image in 2025, digitising it and reworking it slightly is also a way of measuring the distance travelled. In nearly forty years, I have seen photography move from film to digital, and then to mirrorless cameras, without my way of seeing changing fundamentally.

I still frame and anticipate a scene with the reflexes I acquired in the film era, when “work fast and be perfect” was the motto of the motorsport press photographer. Thirty-six frames per roll, waiting for development and discovering the contact sheets trained my eye and still influence my images today, whether they are made with a Nikon Z8 or other recent cameras. That film culture continues to shape my current practice, even when I’m working in colour or on very different subjects.

I talk in more detail about this evolution of my practice over nearly 40 years in the article The evolution of photography: 40 years between film, digital and mirrorless (in French). It traces the permanent connection between my early years with film, my first digital cameras and the creative freedom offered by today’s mirrorless systems.

Why this image matters to me

Among all the photographs I made in that period, this escalator scene at the Louvre has a special place. From the very first development, it stood out as one of my favourite images. It is not linked to any specific assignment and is not part of a carefully constructed series about the museum. It comes straight from instinct, from a quick gesture, from a graphic intuition in the middle of a visit.

What makes it important to me is precisely its ability to condense into a single frame the encounter between a place, a moment and a few anonymous characters. It is a way of portraying a space and its atmosphere in one unique image. This photograph is representative of my style, which moves between different subjects but always keeps this desire to create strongly graphic images, whether I am working on architecture, landscapes or street scenes.

Bringing this image back to life by digitising the negative extends the dialogue between my film years and my current practice. It is a reminder that our archives still contain many photographs that have not finished speaking to us, as long as we take the time to look at them again and bring them into the present.