There is something immediately unsettling about Kourtney Roy’s photographs. The swimming pools are too blue. The skies too clear. The women — often herself — too alone in settings too perfect. That is precisely where the strength of her work lies: in the quiet discomfort that settles between the dream being sold and the reality buried beneath it. I loved this exhibition, and I have admired her work for several years.
All Inclusive, the exhibition devoted to her at the Cité de l’Économie until 20 September 2026, brings together thirty photographs from three series — The Tourist, Sorry, No Vacancy and In Between / Entre Deux Mondes — to paint an unsparing portrait of the global tourism industry. Ten percent of world GDP, millions of bodies in motion, territories transformed, cultures flattened and packaged for sale: Kourtney Roy photographs all of this, but through desire rather than denunciation.
Canadian, shaped by both fashion and documentary, she stages herself in standardised environments — generic hotels, catalogue beaches, depopulated poolsides. Her images carry the seduction of advertisements, and that is exactly the trap. We look at them with pleasure before realising they are looking back at us, asking what we are complicit in.
On 14 June, Kourtney Roy led a guided tour of the exhibition herself — forty-five minutes, before an audience that had come to hear her speak about her work in person. A rare moment, which says something about her way of being present: at once in front of and behind the lens.
The exhibition is housed in the Hall Defrasse of the Hôtel Gaillard, an architectural jewel in the 17th arrondissement that adds to the elegant strangeness of the whole. It is free every weekend throughout the summer. Absolutely not to be missed if you are in Paris.
Grégory Herpe
Cité de l’Économie — 1, place du Général Catroux, Paris 17e. Until 20 September 2026.
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