With its 149 galleries participating, Paris Photo is the foremost worldwide showcase dedicated to the art of photography. Located at the Grand Palais Éphémère, near the Eiffel Tower, this 26th edition presented the work of more than 800 artists. Here are C41’s picks.
Presented by the German gallery Julian Sander, the series Sueños by artist Grete Stern is a collection of photomontages that explore dreams and the subconscious mind. The series was originally published in the Argentinian women’s magazine Idilio between 1948 and 1951, as an illustration for the column entitled “Psychoanalysis Will Help You”. Women were encouraged to send their dreams to have them analyzed for the magazine and each photomontage in the series depicts a dreamlike scene with surreal and symbolic elements.At the French gallery Baudoin Lebon, we found German artist Jan C. Schlege’s giant polaroid of a black lily flower that caught our attention. Schlegel discovered his passion for photography at the age of fourteen within the scope of a Photo course at school, and won the AGFA photo competition, before becoming a renowned black-and-white portraitist. Made in 2022, this photo is extracted from his series entitled The Very Last of a Legend.
At the Amsterdam-based Tegenboschvanvreden gallery’s booth is fashion photographer Paul Kooiker’s most iconic images from his brand commissions. In a departure from prevailing beauty standards, the Dutch photographer crafts a captivating form of beauty that defies convention. All of his images were taken with an iPhone, an ironic message when contemplating the otherworldly images the artist crafts.
At Stieglitz19 Gallery’s booth is the work of photographer Marie Tomanova which explores the complexities of displacement, identity, inclusivity, gender, and sexuality. The series exhibited “was about finding my community, the people that represented the New York I came for. Because, I’m from the Czech Republic, in the former Eastern Bloc and the American dream is still a real thing. When Trump got elected; all of a sudden it was a totally different landscape and it wasn’t the freedom I was looking for. But these kids represented that for me,” explains the artist to C41.
Made by French fashion photographer Sarah Moon, this photograph of a peacock is exhibited at the Camera Obscura gallery booth. Renowned for her striking black-and-white compositions, bold contrasts, and whimsical blurring techniques, Moon’s aesthetic is so distinctive that her work stands out unmistakably among thousands of photographers.
At the gallery of the renowned international photography agency Magnum is the work of American photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti. Taken from her renowned series, The Adventures of Guille and Belinda, she dedicated five years to shadowing and capturing the lives of two young girls on a farm in Argentina.
Mesmerizing in its profound modernity, this photograph was, in fact, captured in 1957 by Romain Urhausen. Born in Luxembourg, the photographer actively contributed to the German subjective photography movement of the 50’s and 60’s. “The subjective aesthetic he learned from Otto Steinert [German photographer and founder of the Subjective Photography movement ndlr] marked his formal language, his way of treating contrasts and composition, but also his way of looking differently at the world”, explains the gallerist of Parisian Les Douches la Galerie.
Presented by the New York-based gallery Yancey Richardson, the work of South African visual activist and photographer Zanele Muholi is imbued with a potent aesthetic composition that not only captivates visually but also serves as a powerful vehicle for political advocacy. Muholi explains their work as rewriting, “a black queer and trans visual history of South Africa for the world to know of our resistance and existence […]”.
It’s during a visit to the National Meteorological Service in Mexico City that contemporary artist Alexandra Germán found inspiration for her series Diáfano. Exploring various measurement instruments, including the heliograph, which records daylight hours by generating continuous carbonization lines, Germán, in a parallel fashion, manually intervened over her sky images with a soldering iron and silver metallic leaf.
The technology-focused gallery Fellowship is exhibiting the creations of American and Azerbaijani scientist Elman Mansimov. The series presents the first-ever text-to-image artworks employing an AI technology he called the “align DRAW model”, a pioneering creation from 2015.