Daft Punk Without Helmets: Paris Show Collects the Robots' Lost Decade

Sixty photographs by nine international photographers will go on view at 114 rue de Turenne in Paris from November 20 to 22, 2026, in "Around the World" — an exhibition tracing the first decade of Daft Punk, from unmasked French Touch newcomers in 1995 to the helmeted robots the world came to recognize without ever seeing a face.

Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo made a trade that few musicians would accept: to become two of the most recognizable figures in contemporary music, they gave up their own faces. From the early 2000s, one silver helmet and one gold one did the work that expressions normally do. Their visual identity became inseparable from their musical one.

What can visitors actually see?

The earliest works are the rarest. Philippe Levy's portraits from 1995 to 1997 show the duo as two young French musicians, pre-transformation — images now almost absent from collective memory, according to the exhibition's account.

The robot era follows, and it's stranger than the mythology suggests:

• Luis Sanchis photographed the two robots for the British magazine The Face in 2001, placing them in everyday situations, from domestic settings to surreal scenarios.
• Seb Janiak, who directed the 1997 video for "Burnin'", imagined them as extraterrestrial visitors exploring Earth.
• In Japan, Tetsuro Sato photographed them in Tokyo's streets and subway, while Kuge Yasuhide shot them for Relax magazine.

The settings and tones differ, but the images share one idea: once the faces are concealed, everything else becomes expression. Posture, dress, the way the two occupy space — all of it takes on the significance that traditional portraiture reserves for the gaze. That is a genuinely photographic proposition, and the strongest reason to see the show.

Who organized it, and why?

The exhibition, curiously, was born of regret. Lenny Houari, Guillaume Vidal, Stéphane Kazazian, Benjamin Felix and Landry Thomas — five friends who grew up listening to Daft Punk — realized they belonged to a generation that arrived too late for the duo's early concerts.

In 2024, after staging an exhibition of Stéphane Meunier's photographs of the French national football team during the 1998 World Cup, they went looking for images of their favorite musicians that had become increasingly hard to find. The trail led to photographers who had shot the duo for international music magazines through the 1990s and 2000s. Many of those pictures, made before digital photography became widespread, had rarely if ever been seen since their original print publication.

The result is an archive telling two parallel stories: the musicians before their transformation, and the robots who took their place. A mythology carefully built over the years — and ended with equal spectacle. In "Epilogue", the 2021 video announcing the split, one robot explodes in the desert while the other walks away.

Three days is a short run for sixty photographs spanning a decade. Anyone curious about what the helmets replaced — or how concealed faces sharpen everything around them — should book early. The opening image, Daft Punk as shot by Luis Sanchis for The Face in 2001, suggests the tone: familiar machines, unfamiliar intimacy.