The Grand Palais offered a spectacular setting for the latest edition of Paris Photo. The 27th edition of the November fair drew a remarkable 80,000 visitors—23 percent more than the 2023 edition—with lines around the venue. On the day of Observer’s visit, more than 7,000 collectors, photography enthusiasts and sundry VIPs attended from around the world, and business was booming.
While Paris Photo is decidedly overwhelming, the organizers helped fairgoers navigate the labyrinthine onslaught of images by dividing the exhibition into several major categories, each allotted a different geographical space among the three levels of the sprawling Grand Palais. The Main sector took up most of the ground floor, with booths mounted by 147 largely blue-chip galleries. The Emergence sector featured twenty-three solo shows presented by younger galleries spanning the back half of the second-level balcony, while the front half of the level showcased the Editions section, focused on recent art books curated by international publishing houses. The second-year iteration of the newly inaugurated Digital sector was found just behind the Main sector on the ground floor. And a new section, Voices, presented thematic projects by three independent curators just inside the VIP entrance in the southeast gallery, showcasing the thoughtful juxtaposition of disparate bodies of recent photographic work.
Highlights from the Main sector
The Main sector was undoubtedly a commercial success, attesting to the growing market for photography among global collectors. The presentation began with the massive display of August Sander’s most renowned project: “People of the 20th Century,” presented in full for the first time in Europe. Showcased by Paris-based Galerie Julian Sander, this suite of 619 photographs offered a window into Germany between the wars through Sander’s stark yet sensitive black-and-white portraits of individuals across all spectrums of society.
Beyond this fortress of faces, the ground floor of the Palais expanded into a maze of commercial gallery booths, visually remarkable for its vast scale when viewed from the second-floor wrap-around balconies. The main arteries of the showroom offered a tour through many of photography’s most iconic images. Pace Gallery sold works by Robert Frank, Robert Rauschenberg, Peter Hujar and Irving Penn for as much as €350,000. Fraenkel Gallery mounted a solo show for Hiroshi Sugimoto that sold works for up to €500,000. Several French galleries also had strong showings, including the sale of a work by John Kayser for €80,000 by Christian Berst.
Highlights from the Emergence sector
Offering a platform for younger galleries, the Emergence sector featured solo shows mounted by twenty-three international galleries and bore out collectors’ enthusiasm for acquiring work from early to mid-career artists. A particular highlight was the work of Paris-based photographer Lucile Boiron, whose glossy, seductive images of somewhat grotesque bodily subject matter brought by HORS-CADRE fetched up to €24,000 for a single piece. Other works sold for upwards of €10,000, including an image by Paris-based photographer Letizia Le Fur.
Highlights from the Voices sector
All three of the curated shows in the newly launched Voices sector were worth a visit, if somewhat uneven in their curatorial agenda. “Imperfect Paradises” drew together eleven artists from Latin America with a strong focus on portraiture and the human body. Such subject matter proved a great success, as several works sold, including one piece for €40,000. A second show, “Liberated Bodies,” explored archival images drawn from the practice of three artists, Cai Dongdong from China, Lebohang Kganye and Joana Choumali, both from Africa. While individual works were compelling, particularly the deftly displayed archival interventions by Cai, the geographical breadth and loose concept of the show would have benefited from more coherent logic. The strongest exhibition, “Four Walls,” explored the expressive capacity of photographic practice confined within domestic space—predominately within the repressive context of the former Eastern bloc. Notably, a piece by Romanian artist Aurora Király was acquired by MoMA. Given the recent rise of increasingly repressive political regimes globally, the emancipatory potentials of such private havens felt especially resonant.
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Highlights from the Book sector
The Book sector, which featured selections from forty-five publishing houses and hosted more than 400 artists’ signings, was continually packed. This enthusiasm for photo books spilled over to a satellite venue showcasing editions by dozens of smaller publishers mounted by the non-profit Polycopies, scenically situated on a boat moored on the Seine. One highlight for book lovers was the announcement of the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards, given this year to five international photographers. Twenty-five-year-old Tsai Ting Bang was ecstatic to receive Aperture’s first award, along with €10,000 in prize money for his self-published volume Born from the Same Root. This intimate tome reflects on the artist’s relationship with his older brother and the diverse paths their lives have taken through a beautiful use of a dual-bound format allowing the viewer to progress through the narrative by opening a pair of pictures side by side.
Highlights from the Digital sector
It turns out NFTs are hardly old news. The Digital sector hosted a mere ten galleries but saw a remarkable sales total of a million euros. The young Turkish Alkan Avcıoğlu (Tender) sold 150 online works for €52,000, more than double what he earned for physical prints. The series “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” featured spectacular digital renderings of photo-realist topographies dominated by screens. This vocabulary of hyper-realist excess immediately calls to mind the work of Wang Qingsong, or for that matter, Andreas Gursky, whose collage 99 Cent, was sold for over $4 million in 1999, making it the most expensive photograph sold to date. 99 Cent has often been discussed as a critique of capitalist excess, and it is hard not to see Avcıoğlu’s series as a similarly pointed criticism of the new social paradigm dominated by artificial intelligence. Given the precedent set by Gursky, among others, one does wonder why the fair chose to sponsor a separate Digital sector. Haven’t photographers been using digital manipulation for decades?
Putting aside such questions (which will certainly resolve themselves in time), it’s worth remembering that the monumental glass-roofed Grand Palais that hosted Paris Photo was originally built for the Universal Exposition of 1900—an event that would later be known as the World’s Fair. This structure was literally constructed to contain the world, albeit in miniature, bringing together wonders from every corner of the globe. While the allure of the World’s Fair has waned since the turn of the century, one might see our insatiable appetite for the photographic image as having taken its place. At Paris Photo, one could truly view the whole of the world under one roof.
