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| Tania Franco Klein, Dear Stranger (Self-Portrait), 2020. Courtesy of Rose Gallery. |
Au fond de l'Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!
– Charles Baudelaire, “Le Voyage”
Off again, to parts unknown. The humongous Paris Photo at the Grand Palais is a concert for the eyes, a tonic for the mind and, sure enough, a tribulation for the calves.
Thousands and thousands of images and multifarious expressions and endless ways of looking at the world and to create art, and yet what these pictures all have in common is a handy little “machine”:
“Only a few years ago, there was born to us a machine that has since become the glory of our age, and that day after day amazes the mind and startles the eye,” penned the Belgian artist Antoine Wiertz, one hundred and seventy years ago. “This machine, a century hence, will be the brush, the palette, the colours, the craft, the practice, the patience, the glance, the touch, the paste, the glaze, the trick, the relief, the finish, the rendering.”
I believe he was right. Camera work done well is almost everything that you can ever wish for as it draws you into the throb of life and humanity’s finer endowments.
In the days when the Grand Palais was built for the Exposition Universelle of 1900, photography was still relegated to the industrial sections of the world’s fairs. The French fairy of the Belle Époque must have roamed the magnificent Grand Palais to encourage its huge glass roof, the greenish tint of the framework and the lithe fluidity of the Art Nouveau-elaborated elements in plentiful supply. The building is so massively beautiful that Le Corbusier was about to destroy it in the mid-1960s, but death has never come to someone at a better moment. Today the Grand Palais is the flawless host of the most significant photo fair in the world.
“Since we came back to the Grand Palais, everyone’s happy, there’s no rain coming in, it’s clean and very nice,” says Howard Greenberg. “I started doing Paris Photo from the second one [1998], and for other reasons I’ve always been well positioned in Paris so I love coming here, it has always been successful for us. This year I was very insecure [chuckles] just because it’s so quiet in the photography business, even in New York. However, we are doing wonderful, like always. And for me, personally, reconnecting with a lot of old friends I haven’t seen in years sometimes is fantastic.”
“In terms of my opinion of the heart of the entire fair, it’s hard to say. There is so much work here, you know. A lot of the contemporary that I see, I really don’t know about – it might look good to me, it might not look good to me – but I am not going to give my opinion because I am not the person who knows about that world,” avers the famous New York photo gallerist (and gentleman). “From point of view of the look of the booths, I think it is the best Paris Photo ever. I think the photography people have really figured out how to make their booths look like art, and make Paris Photo look like an art fair – and that’s fantastic, that’s great. In terms of everything else, I don’t know … it’s good, it’s good.”
One of the finest displays at the 2024 fair was a bevy of black-and-white old splendour from two North American photographers, Todd Webb and Ernest Stone, care of Augusta Edwards in London. Edwards regards Paris Photo as the peak event of the year for photography, “and I feel everyone always puts their best foot forward and bring incredible material, and everything else that goes along aside it. And having the publishers, the talks – I mean, it surpasses everything.” When I imply that this year’s edition is such an improvement from the previous, she responds that “Yeah, it seems last year people were trying anything – anything goes – and this year feels more cohesive.”
Let us deal with PP24 for a moment since photography at that time was reaching a critical point where so many of its practitioners seemingly agreed to trash the medium’s inherent spirit, disposition and beauty. Simultaneously it was the year of that worthless thirty-second Jaguar commercial and the sheer artificiality of the eight woke clones and the five slogan puffs – “Create Exuberant”, “Live Vivid”, “Delete Ordinary”, “Break Moulds” and “Copy Nothing” – and all you could see was fakery, constraint, overprocessed digital junk and dead people.
The perfect photograph at PP24 for serving as an allegory, if unintentional, for the photographic medium’s worrying circumstances – doubting or even rejecting both imagination and visual truths (even though a photograph is never quite a mere copy of reality) – was the great and very friendly Belgian tableaux vivant artist Bart Ramakers’s image of a greyed painter at a sunset beach, with a ravishing naked young lady touching his shoulder for attention. However, what the geezer is actually painting is a man playing a grotesquely big alphorn, with the Alps as a backdrop. A scenery that has nothing to do with anything.
PP24 had a lot of things going on with photography doubting its very ground beneath. There were all these silly images of decoupaged foliage (etc) – sure done by darkroom methods peculiar only to photography, but at best decorative – that endeavoured to look like Pictorialism (an old branch of photography posing as something “better”). And then, inevitably, we were served something much worse – the plastic sheen of lost artistry. Remember what the cartoon boy said about AI in South Park: “Just because something is kissing your arse doesn’t mean it has good ideas.”
As Gerry Badger maintains in his book Collecting Photography: “No matter how technically inept, how lacking in considered artistic qualities, a photograph must always stop us short. It puts us into immediate touch with the long ago and the far away, with the quick and the dead.” Strolling from booth to booth at this year’s Paris Photo was like being in a better arranged universe; the muchness and the impressions of the pieces from 1,461 photographers, the polyglotism and the joy of meeting gallery people from various parts of the world who provided stories to the photographs that stopped me short in various grades of amazement.
A non-curated “theme” at PP25 was undoubtedly the images with a cinematic touch, and the finest of these booths was Rose Gallery’s exclusive presentation of the Mexico City artist Tania Franco Klein’s (b 1990) work of harrowing, yet beautifully-depicted non-places where each of these images is like a decoction of an entire film you want to find out more about, with some concerns. “We wanted to show her now as a solo exhibition because she has a piece in the MoMA show New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging, and she’s at an installation at the Getty, so it kind of felt like this is the perfect time. She’s amazing!” says Sophie Winner from the Santa Monica gallery.
“This is a combination of many of her works. Tania does a lot of work involving different characters that she creates and who reflect the social anxieties that are imposed upon us right now, especially in her generation. Her latest series Rage™️ is the first time it is showing outside of Mexico. All of the different series build on each other, and this trademark takes the idea of rage and what it means and how it has become a charged word, and how that in itself is a reflection of all the anxiety and the rage that is built up between all of us. She’s taking that idea, and different aspects that come with that idea, and examines essentially what that word means. Everything is so meticulous, every last detail is played out, and she brings you into an entire world.”
With many of the American galleries not leaving home this year there was a definite lack of vintage prints at the Grand Palais. The most stunning ones were Todd Webb’s signed prints from Paris in 1950. Chantal Fabres of Augusta Edwards explains that Webb was a stockbroker who lost his money in the big Wall Street crash of 1929. “Then he did a bunch of odd jobs. He went to Detroit and took a photography class for Anselm Adams, with Harry Callahan in the same class, and he liked it very much. He moved to New York and met Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe and he got into this world of photographers.”
“And then he was obviously drafted into the Second World War, but not as a photographer. After the war he moved to Paris for four years. Years later, he did the same thing as Robert Frank. Whereas Frank drove across the US, Todd Webb walked his pioneer trail from Oregon to California, effectively at the same time. There is a new book being published now by his estate. He printed everything himself – look, they are magnificent, aren’t they? I love them, they are so delicate.”
A good thing about PP25 was the numerous galleries from Japan, and that there are other things to display than Daido Moriyama’s fishnet tights. PGI in Tokyo is the second oldest photo gallery in the country and its director Sayaka Takahashi’s selection of superbly-crafted photographs just stopped me on the spot before a series of trees – grief manifested with such accuracy and quiet grace. Takahashi’s perception when she talks about these artists (chosen from marginal perspectives) is extensive. Her pain is sometimes tangible when the past comes up.
“Here is James Osamu Nakawa who is a Japanese-American photographer. He was travelling in the United States from 2022 and visited Japanese concentration camps. These pictures [Witness Trees series] are portraits of trees from these places. And these pictures are echoing Yasuhiro Ishimoto who was born in San Francisco and schooled in Japan, and he was interned [this was where he learned photography] when he returned. After that he went to Chicago and was educated by Harry Callahan. Ishimoto’s national ideas were Japanese, but he was also Asian American in his perspectives.”
Another great artist in the PGI booth is Yoshihiko Ito. “He belongs to a generation of konpora shashin – ‘konpora’ is short for contemporary in Japanese and ‘shashin’ is photography – and there was a movement in the late 1970s and 80s. Ito’s work is from the 1990s and he is really observing and is trying to deeply reflect how time persists in photography, and he sketches before he photographs. These are self-portraits with his shadow. He is one of the most important artists from the post-World War II generation and his works are iconic.”
And there’s a new series by Asako Narahashi called 1961 – They Were Standing There based on reeking negatives, full of damages, that the artist found one day. These are gifted snapshots taken by her father on a trip to East Germany through the Soviet Union sixty-four years ago, and the dreams they carry are despite of everything untouched. Takahashi guides me over to Kikuji Kawada’s Godzilla rendition of Goya’s Los Caprichos etchings, and she says that she wanted to show these works “because the world situation now is really complicated. And I wanted to do this in Paris since people in Europe have feelings close to us, even if Japan is kind of far from everywhere.”
Miyako Yoshinaga’s staffers calls for “Miyako-san” when I enter the NYC gallerist’s booth. She takes me to a series of mugshot-like close-ups of filmmakers such as Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut, shot by Ken Ohara at the New York Film Festival in 1970 for Harper’s Bazaar – the same year that his photobook One with five hundred faces of nameless New Yorkers was published. “The human sameness is the eyes and nose and mouth and eyebrows, but everything else has a little, subtle difference. Some people see them as individuals and some people see them as all the same, two different views shifting.” Yoshinaga says that she liked the idea of bringing this discovery to Paris where so many classic films have been made.
If the Chromotherapia exhibition at the French Academy at the Villa Medici in Rome this year was successful in any way, it was in how it showed colour photography’s progress from the early trials to its acceleration into garishness and vulgarity (save Guy Bourdin, if I dare to mention his name again). Two masters of colour that were not in that ho-hum “feelgood show” are Harry Gruyaert and Fred Herzog, whose images perked up the Grand Palais this year. German-born Herzog left Stuttgart and sailed to Canada in 1952, since “new, clean, safe and honest neighbourhoods do not give rise to interesting pictures”.
The only type of film he loaded his Leica with from 1957 and onwards was Kodachrome. Sophie Brodovitch, director of Equinox Gallery in Herzog’s beloved hometown Vancouver, explains that “All of these photos were slides and filed in his house in little slide drawers. And he would set up a show at home and project when we would go over– and we said ‘yes, no, yes, no’ – and that was the discovery process.”
“Many people know Fred Herzog through the books and he has had some exhibitions in Europe, but when they see the real pictures – that’s a point of discovery for them. After Fred died [in 2019], we were entrusted to manage all his photographic material, and within that there were a hundred thousand slides that we had not seen, and for five years we’ve been going through them, little by little, and narrowing them down to sixty-nine photographs which are presented here for the first time and which make up the new book that is just released.”
The colourful Enrica Viganò, founder of Admira in Milano, calls herself “a curator more than a gallerist” and her contribution to PP25 was one of the fair’s absolute wows. She clarifies that “This is a show curated around the theme of Neorealismo photography. The films are very famous but the photography needed to be known.” Admira had a show at the New York University in 2018 – Neorealismo: The New Image in Italy, 1932–1960 (along with a beautiful book with a preface by Martin Scorsese) – and the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired ninety-three of these prints.
Signora Viganò says that for the Paris booth she wanted to display “not only the poverty of Neorealismo but also the désir de vivre, the desire for life” with walls of images “from Sardinia to Milano to the south of Italy”. “I visited one hundred photographers when I started in the 1990s. They were not well known and they did not think that they could sell to the collecting market. I found vintage print material that is amazing. If these photographers had been French, they would have been known as humanist photographers. Italians were not well known, but now after twenty years of hard work the Neorealismo photographers are really appreciated. My mission is ongoing.”
Another Milano gallery is Viasaterna, which was the most interesting of all the booths dedicated to performance-based photography, and they presented two female Italian artists who worked in the same cultural sphere: “Elisabetta Catalano was a Roman photographer who was very close to the artists of the Italian avant-garde and the Roman Pop Art movement, and she worked together with her partner Fabio Mauri for over thirty years. She was a very special photographer because she was not only a portrayer, she was a photographer who was able to stimulate the artists’ creativity into co-creating some performances,” says gallery director Carolin Mittermair in front of a couple of inspired portraits of Joseph Beuys and painter Cesare Tacchi.
“And in dialogue with Elisabetta we have Marion Baruch. She’s a Romanian-born artists who is ninety-four years old. Her work is related to textile, and she is famous for her huge installations where she also plays with emptiness. These are her early works from the 1970s, for example this one is Abito-Contenitore, a performance in which she wears this textile garment [an image where her figure is facing us with raised arms, but her shoes are pointing backwards] and she walks down Via Montenapoleone, the most famous Milanese fashion street on a sort of runway. We are in 1969 so there is also a sort of irony to her conceptual performance.”
Another one looks like the manifestation of the Aphrodite’s Child song “Loud, Loud, Loud” (recorded in 1970–71) – “The day the cars will lay in heaps / Their wheels turning in vain / We’ll run along the empty highways / Shouting, screaming, singing / Loud, loud, loud, loud” – and Carolin Mittermair explains that “the title of this performance is Contenitore-Ambiente [1971] and it was in fact a public action where she invited people to go inside these plastic spheres that were designed by Fronzoni. They were like a transportable environment, sort of a second skin, and she also wanted to stop the traffic so there is also some irony.”
An irritant from PP24 was how so many artists and galleries packaged their works in all sorts of silly frames and presentations, once again an indication of the medium’s self-doubt. This year, Casemore Gallery in San Francisco had two wonderfully big, aquatic prints by Kanoa Zimmerman, an American artist and a freediver based in Hawaii, with the frames very internal to the works in the most beautiful way: the prints sort of float in the frame, and the frames have the appearance of ship portholes.
The gallery’s representative, Chris Gunder, tells me that Zimmerman is in his early forties and that “he is still shooting black-and-white film, still developing in the darkroom himself, and prints on silver gelatin paper. And it’s so uncommon at this scale. The fact is that the film is not really designed to be blown up this large, so you get visible grain that almost feels like graphite.”
The remarkable Florencia Giordana Braun – who founded Rolf Art Gallery in Buenos Aires in 2009 (the only gallery in Argentina fully dedicated to photography), and who did her third round this year as a member of Paris Photo’s international committee – is an inspiration to all of us who love photography. There is passion, there is knowledge and there’s positive authority in everything she says and displays.
“We have the pleasure to represent two iconic pioneers of photography from my region: Sara Facio and Alice D’Amico, two radical women who not only produced wonderful work but also changed the way that we perceive photography in Argentina. Together they created the first editorial house for photography, La Azotea, and they also created the first association for photography in the country, the first photo gallery, and they created a collection of photography for Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. Because the French government invited Sara and Alicia in the early 1950s to France, I think that they became very connected to this humanist approach to the urban landscape.”
“What we are doing here is to revisit their three iconic photographic essays. When they came back to Argentina, they did a beautiful photographic book titled Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires [1968], one of the first photobooks from Argentina, which was forbidden during the military process in the country. Humanario [1976] was also a very important photobook that they did about the inmates’ condition at the Borda Psychiatric Hospital in Buenos Aires. This book was also forbidden for a long time in my country, and it is still impossible to get it today.”
“We are also showing pictures from Autorretratos [1974], which was a book that they did that is gathering together their portraits of the most beautiful minds from Latin America – Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay, Chile. The book is an exchange of images and texts, and the most interesting thing is that these photos were taken here in France because most of these great intellectuals were in exile because of the situation we had. So for us it is wonderful with these two brilliant photographers in the show, and also to reunite them. Sara and Alicia were partners but they split in the early 1960s, and after that their archives were never shown together again. For the first time in sixty-five years, we are doing it here at Paris Photo.”
The PP25 directrices Florence Bourgeois and Anna Planes talked about “diversity” which in a Feminist frame of reference translates as women choosing women curators who choose women photographers who choose images of women. The Elles side dish was a particularly one-sided affair complete with word salad writing and female percentage scores regarding women in exhibitions, etc – the sort of self-serving sanctimony that never advances the culture of humanity. The long wall where you enter the Grand Palais, which is there to establish the tone for Paris Photo, was filled up with this year’s winner of the Hasselblad Award, Sophie Ristelhueber.
“To stand in the darkroom and watch your pictures slowly appear from sheets of white paper is a magical experience. With flashes of light, chemicals and formula, photography is a kind of sorcery,” suggests John Ingledew in The Creative Photographer. “The fact that photographs can stop time by preserving moments that have now passed is itself extraordinary.”
Paris is where this sorcery all began – when Niépce met Daguerre at Charles Chevalier’s optician’s shop at the corner of Quai de l’Horloge and Place du Pont Neuf, near the equestrian statue on Île de la Cité. These men were scientists, inventors and instrument makers. Then came the painters, like Charles Nègre; the illustrators, like Charles Marville; and the poets, like the fantastic Atget.
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| Gyula Zaránd, Enfants de la rue VIII, 1964, Budapest. Courtesy of Galerie Waltman. |
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| Sante Vittoria Malli, When Snow Means Bread. Milano, 1956. Courtesy of Admira. |