Agnès Varda nurtured a special attachment to Sète. A Sétoise by adoption, having taken refuge there as a teenager during the Second World War, she returned every year until the early 1960s.
After studying photography at the École de Vaugirard (1949), Agnès Varda moved to rue Daguerre in Paris and set up her own studio and laboratory. A portrait and set photographer, she also took on commissions and carried out reportage work abroad. In 1954, a pivotal year, she mounted her first solo exhibition and made her first film, La Pointe-Courte.
She gradually put her photographic career on hold to devote herself to her film work: Cléo de 5 à 7 (1961), Le Bonheur (1964), Sans toit ni loi (1985), Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (1999), Les Plages d’Agnès (2008) and Varda par Agnès (2019), among others. More than thirty exhibitions have been devoted in France and around the world to the artist who liked to describe herself as “an old filmmaker and a young visual artist”.
