Noir & Blanc: A Story of Photography is M+’s first exhibition on photography, co-presented with the French May Arts Festival and in collaboration with the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). This thematic exhibition examines black-and-white photography as a time-honoured medium of art by presenting more than 250 important photographs from BnF’s collection, complemented by over thirty photographs from the M+ Collections. With works dated from 1915 to 2019 in three thematic sections—‘Aiming for Contrast’, ‘Light and Shadow’, and ‘Colour Chart’—the exhibition explores the enduring aesthetics of black-and-white photography and offers different perspectives to understand black-and-white image-making over the course of more than a century.

BnF houses one of the largest and most important public collections of black-and-white photography in the world. This exhibition will be the first major public presentation of BnF’s photography collections in Asia in such a large number and will feature over 170 internationally celebrated photographers, including Man Ray, Diane Arbus, Mario Giacomelli, Robert Frank, William Klein, Daido Moriyama, Valérie Belin, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. The exhibition also showcases eminent photographers and artists represented in the M+ Collections, such as Chang Chao-Tang, Ho Fan, Lang Jingshan, Nalini Malani, Ishimoto Yasuhiro, and Yau Leung, tracing the ways their practices transform this expressive medium.