National Museum

A critical work on national identity, Musée national is a corpus of around 1000 contextual portraits of Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, each wearing an identical mask, that Marc Lathuillière has been developing for the last 15 years.

Defacing and freezing the subjects, the mask casts daily surroundings in an estranging light, revealing the stereotypes upon which they build their lives: clothing, furniture, architecture, landscape, professional or daily rituals… Showing France as a museum, the series exposes a country whose people, fearful of the future, increasingly define themselves in terms of heritage and memory. It also explores the construction of identities, both individual and collective.

National Museum met with a significant critical and public success since the 2014 Month of Photography in Paris, where Marc Lathuillière organized a double exhibition with Michel Houellebecq, both in galleries and Paris train stations. The writer wrote the foreword of Musée national, a catalogue of the first ten years of the series published by Editions de La Martinière. The Neuflize Vie Foundation as well as the Musée Français de la Photographie and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF) have acquired prints from this wide inventory, the later in the prospect of French Landscapes, the retrospective on landscape photography it hosted in 2017. It followed two large solo shows, one with anthropologist Marc Augé at La Friche La Belle de Mai in Marseille, the other at the Creux de l’Enfer (Thiers) one of France’s foremost art centers, for the Lyon Biennale, coupled with a long term exhibition at Galeries Lafayette Clermont-Ferrand. The series has also been exhibited in group shows at Photoszene Festival in Cologne, Paris Photo, Photo London, the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg (MAMCS), Kolga Tbilisi Photo in Georgia.