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The Louvre is an island of extraterritoriality: here, you hear every language on earth, except French! Well, almost: you'll run into Belgians, Swiss, and Quebecers. Otherwise, the bulk of visitors come from Asia, whom some ill-informed commentators believe come to France mainly to buy Vuitton bags or Hermès scarves. Colossal mistake! Asians are voracious consumers of Western culture, and they'll absorb everything: just look at the list of winners of international piano and violin competitions... Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Queen Elisabeth... and the proportion of winners who are Asian or from...
Are foreign tourists not admirable folks? They come from the ends of the earth and know that in Paris and its surrounding region, there's Versailles, the Eiffel Tower, and the Louvre, even Notre-Dame and... Galeries Lafayette. And you have to see all that in one day, or two at most. Watching them rush through the Louvre is quite a disconcerting sight. How could one not be impressed?
Where tourist guides fall short is in providing foreign visitors with incomplete information, such as how to access the Louvre. This leads to endless queues forming in the Cour Napoléon, in front of the large glass pyramid, while access via the underground passages (e.g., the Palais Royal metro station or the Carrousel du Louvre) is virtually instantaneous!
Each of my visits to the Louvre is usually dedicated to a single room, like last Friday, when I entered the Greek antiquities around 2:30 p.m. and didn't leave until the announcement that "the Louvre is about to close," around 6:00 p.m.
Photographing all the statuary in the Louvre in 3D—that's the plan. I've been working on it for almost a year now. And to do this, we plan everything, we catalog everything. So, we go room by room, returning to the same spot several times to make sure we haven't missed anything. Last Friday's visit was just for reconnaissance. The room? Those familiar with the Louvre shouldn't have any trouble identifying it. Others will just have to go and try to find their way around...
The images? Raw and unedited, a bit like film rushes. I've only cropped most of them, because stereoscopic framing always produces some blurring. Otherwise, no retouching of brightness, contrast, saturation, etc. It's worth noting that flash photography is prohibited in all museums in France. So, we work with the ambient light.
To make things clear, I've included two images below that were quickly retouched to compensate for an overly dark atmosphere. None of the other images have undergone this kind of retouching.
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As an aside, before accessing the Greek antiquities, one (almost) inevitably passes in front of a sphinx (Egyptian of course! Sphinx if it is a male, sphynge if it is a female. I didn't have time to check...).
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