Culturalee visited the 27th Edition of Paris Photo. The 2024 edition marks the return of Paris Photo to the historic Grand Palais following extensive renovations. Paris Photo was founded in 1997, and every year presents a selection of respected international galleries and publishers of contemporary and modern photography.
Paris Photo is blossoming under the direction of Florence Bourgeois and Artistic director Anna Planas, and this year 240 exhibitors from 34 countries are taking part, including 147 galleries in the main sector. A digital sector introduced in 2023 returns under the direction of Nina Roehrs and presents artistic projects involving digital realities and the evolution of digital practices within photography, and an emergence sector curated by Anna Planas showcases 23 contemporary monographic projects. A new Voices Sector launches this year, led by curators Sonia Voss, Azu Nwagbogu and Elena Navarro.
The Ministry of Culture and Kering support the ELLES x Paris Photo program, which highlights women’s contributions to photography. At its inception 6 years ago, only 20% of the artists at the fair were women, and this year that number has risen to 38%. Raphaëlle Stopin curates this year’s ELLES x Paris Photo program. The 2024 program takes on a new form, ensuring that the visibility of female artists grows and is supported by museum acquisitions.
US film director Jim Jarmusch, known for a surreal body of work exploring existential questions, has been invited by Paris Photo to select his favourite photographs. Visitors can follow ‘Parcours’ through the fair to discover the 34 photographs he has chosen, inspired by the centenary of Surrealism and including works by David Hockney, Man Ray, Paolo Reversi, Peter Hujar, and Robert Frank.
Here are Six Culturalee Picks at Paris Photo including; BMW Art Makers, Carlieri Gebauer Gallery, Magnum Gallery, Valeria Bella Gallery, Loft Gallery and Larry Fink.
BMW Art Makers 2024 Winners Mustapha Azeroual and Marjolaine Lévy present ‘The Green Ray’
Artist Mustapha Azeroual and curator Marjolaine Lévy have created an immersive scenography for ‘The Green Ray’, enriched by new lenticular works on large-scale panels and circular mobiles. At the heart of Azeroual’s photographic practice is the production of abstract images that seek to give form to light and colour. The new photographic works on display at Paris Photo are created from pixels and pigments extracted by Azeroual from sailors around the world. Azeroual and Lévy invited sailors in the Arctic, Indian and Pacific oceans and Mediterranean Sea to take photographs of sunrise and sunset on the high seas. Azeroual and Lévy are the winning duo of BMW ART MAKERS 2024.
Lúcia Koch and Paul Graham at Carlieri Gebauer Gallery
Lucia Koch creates surreal, abstract images from ordinary packaging, and is presenting large-scale images from her Fundos series at Berlin gallery Carlieri Gebauer’s booth. Koch investigates matters of space via the insides of empty boxes, using her camera to distort scale and perspective. Her reimagining of the most mundane of objects – cardboard boxes – is elevated to an art form through her photographic reorientation of perception. Other eye-catching images at Carlieri Gallery’s booth include Paul Graham’s Corrupted Cherry Blossom, a vast pixellated image of heavenly pink flowers, and Adbulhamid Kircher’s images of intriguing characters.
Carlieri Gebauer Gallery. Image Courtesy Culturalee.
Magnum Gallery
An edition of Paris Photo wouldn’t be complete without a Magnum presentation, and this year’s curation for doesn’t disappoint with a meeting of classic with contemporary black-and-white and colour photography. Travel through a generation of Magnum photographers with rare and vintage signed prints from Alessandra Sanguinetti, Chris Killip, Elliott Erwitt, Harry Gruyaert, Herbert List, Philippe Halsman and more. Highlights include Cristina de Middel’s Deutsche-Börse shortlisted Journey to the Center series. A series of events, exhibitions and signings run parallel to the fair as Magnum photographers gather in the capital.
Federica Belli and Giacomo Giannini at Valeria Bella Gallery
Milanese gallery, Galleria Valeria Bella, present an eye-catching and very Italian selection of photographers, capturing the essence of La Dolce Vita. Culturalee favourites include Federica Belli’s soporific images of a naked sunbather set against a dreamy sunset vista or submerged in a sandy beach, and Giacomo Giannini’s abstracted visions of Italian beach umbrellas and sun-kissed cornfields.
Alia Ali at Loft Art Gallery
Loft Art Gallery presents photographic-sculptor Alia Ali, whose work stems from the foundations of photography to expansive versions of it. For Paris Photo, she presents three series: Glitzch, Shreds and Refracted Futures. Her presentation of works shifts relevant and pressing binaries of today’s societies by revisioning the politics and poetics of biological v digital, truth v suppression, and ancient v futurist.
Glitzch draws attention to the fluidity and tension between organic and digital ecosystems. We are consistently confronted with what feels like being at “the rise of evolution and edge of destruction.” In Alia’s second series Shred, the word itself carries a double meaning as both a verb and a noun, an action and an object. Alia reflects on positive and negative spaces in Shred. The viewer sees newspapers shredded and rewoven to create a textile in which bodies are wrapped resulting in unrecognizable forms that take on impressions of humans, stones, shred of newspapers and balls of crunched up balls of paper to be thrown away or around.
Alia’s Refracted Futures series brings forth her developing work on Yemeni futurism. Alia’s Futurist work binds research of her native land Yemen informed by discourses of historical reference, astronomy and migration. Her use of dynamic materials sourced and derived from NASA’s space travels, takes us on our own journey of the space in between the past, present and multiple futures.
Larry Fink ‘Sensual Empathy’ at MUUS Collection
MUUS Collection celebrate their newest acquisition, a collection of photographs by American society photographer Larry Fink, with a solo presentation at Paris Photo. Larry Fink (1941-2023) was a social photographer, meaning that he was socially engaged in his work and photographed society. His oeuvre focussed on people and their interactions. He was in the room with them and recognized them as kin, whoever they were. Fink’s monochrome images defined society in its broadest sense. During his six decade career he photographed debutante balls, Oscar parties, demonstrations, boxing matches, and his neighbors in rural Pennsylvania, all with the same bold framing and masterly chiaroscuro. However important the subject of his lens, he captured them with the same immediacy and depth of feeling.
Paris Photo is at the Grand Palais, Paris until Sunday 10th November: https://www.parisphoto.com
