This Summer, the Med is Taking the Train

A new photo exhibition by Greg Lecoeur in several major train stations across France draws attention to the delicate beauty of the Mediterranean Sea.

Staying true to its mission of raising awareness for maritime topics, Monaco’s Oceanographic Museum renews a format that has already had great success in previous years: an open-air installation of XXL billboards of emblematic images highlights the striking contrasts of a unique sea between preserved wild nature and growing fragility linked to human impact. 

Titled “Méditerranée, un joyau fragile” (Mediterranean, a fragile jewel), the works by internationally renowned photographer Greg Lecoeur invite a reflection on what the Mediterranean might become by 2050. The exhibition runs through 31 August in the train stations of Nice, Cannes, Marseille Saint-Charles, and Paris Gare de Lyon, and can be visited in parallel at the Musée Océanographique until early November. 

^{Photo © RIVIERA BUZZ, all rights reserved}

The choice of photographer is deliberate. Nice native Greg Lecoeur grew up swimming and diving in the very sea he now documents, and he has spent the last fifteen years turning that intimacy into some of the most celebrated underwater photography in the world. National Geographic named him Nature Photographer of the Year in 2016; he took the Underwater Photographer of the Year title in 2020. But multiple awards aside, the photo journalist is convinced that a single image can do what a scientific report cannot: make someone stop, feel something, and care. 

We do have good reason to care: The Mediterranean is less than 1% of the world’s oceans, yet shelters over 10% of its biodiversity. It is, as Lecoeur puts it, “at once so alive, so strong, and so fragile.” That fragility is at the heart of the exhibition. Warming waters, pollution, and the relentless pressure of human activity are eroding an ecosystem. The millions of people who live on the shores of the 22 countries bordering the Sea rarely think about, and the tourists even less. But instead of cataloguing the damage, the exhibition shows the beauty at risk of being lost forever, betting that wonder is a more powerful call to action than alarm.

^{Gare SNCF de Nice-Ville – photo by Frédéric Ramin}

Monaco is not a passive backdrop to this conversation. The Principality has been at the forefront of Mediterranean conservation for well over a century, and that tradition is very much alive today. The Musée Océanographique’s Méditerranée 2050 installation, which has drawn over 660,000 visitors since opening last year, takes that mission into fully immersive territory: a journey through the sea’s past and a projection of what it could look like by 2050 if the right choices are made now. 

Beyond the museum, the Fondation Prince Albert II has spent two decades translating concern into action: funding marine protected areas across the basin, fighting plastic pollution, and pushing the 30×30 agenda at the highest diplomatic levels. Monaco understands that awareness without action is just aesthetics, and has chosen both avenues to progress.

^{Gare SNCF de Cannes – photo by David Paquin}

SNCF deserves credit for its consistent role in this. The national railway operator has become a genuine partner in ocean awareness. In 2020, it joined forces with the Oceanographic Museum to bring the celebrated American underwater photographer David Doubilet’s coral reef photography to stations across the French Riviera. In 2023, it was Lecoeur himself in a first exhibition, this time with “Pôles, des mondes fragiles,” turning station concourses into windows onto the Arctic and Antarctic. This summer’s Mediterranean exhibition is another chapter of what is by now a recognizable commitment by SNCF: the conviction that culture in a train station is not decoration but a genuinely democratic act of art that reaches the traveler who might never buy a museum ticket, and that awareness for pressing issues can be raised in the most unexpected places. 

Exhibitions like this one, and the institutions behind them, can open eyes and stir emotions. But the Mediterranean’s future won’t be decided in train stations or museum halls. It will be decided in the small choices that each of us makes, as travelers, consumers, and citizens of coastlines. The sea, as Lecoeur’s photographs make abundantly clear, is not asking for our admiration. It is asking for our attention.

^{Gare SNCF de Marseille – photo by David Paquin}

PHOTO CREDITS

• All photos courtesy Musée Océanographique de Monaco and as credited
• Lead image Gare SNCF Marseille by David Paquin

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