10 seconds

It is said that the average time a visitor spends looking at a work of art in a museum is around 6 seconds. At the Louvre Museum, 35,000 artworks are exhibited out of a total of 460,000 pieces held in its collection. To look at each of them for just 10 seconds, it would take over three full days and two nights without stopping.

This project is a piece of analog photography and museum photography, reflecting on how we experience and perceive art in major institutions. Initiated as part of a class led by photographer Laura Henno, it addresses the theme of invisibility in art spaces, and how screens and speed affect our relationship with artworks.

How do we really look at art in museums today? Are we truly seeing it or just recording it through our smartphones?

During multiple visits to the Louvre, I observed the same ritual: visitors would pause briefly in front of a masterpiece, take a photo, glance at their screen, and walk away. Their experience of the artwork is mediated by a screen, often without direct, sustained attention. The behavior of museum visitors becomes part of the work itself.

I captured this pattern through photography, showing how iconic paintings and sculptures are often surrounded by a crowd of people taking turns with their devices. These images document our contemporary relationship to art, shaped by speed and screens.

Later, I returned to photograph the same works again, but this time, I removed the human presence. I reclaimed the silence of the artworks by photographing them alone, using only an analog camera. No screen. No instant feedback. A slow, deliberate approach that mirrors the kind of attention these pieces deserve.

This series of analog photographs was entirely self-developed, emphasizing both the physicality of the process and the idea of slow looking, as a counterpoint to our increasingly distracted, screen-saturated experience of art.