Paris Photo is the world’s biggest fair dedicated to art photography, held in the capital of France for four days every November, with 160 photography galleries from all over the world offering photos for sale. France holds several annual international festivals for different types of photography, such as Les Rencontres d’Arles, and the Festival of Photojournalism in Perpignan. Paris Photo is the place to see which photographers and trends the commercial art world thinks are hot now. I attended this year on November 8. It was my fifth time to attend Paris Photo.
Paris Photo at the Grand Palais. The low-walled booths in front are for book publishers, and the higher white walled rooms in back are for galleries.
The show is held in the beautiful 100-year old Grand Palais just off the Champs-Elysees, a huge cast iron exhibition building, which, you might remember, was where Tom Cruise landed in his HALO parachute jump in “Mission Impossible: Fallout” without crashing through the glass roof. For Paris Photo the 240-yard long building was filled with three-sided gallery spaces with framed photos on the walls.
My wife and I got to the show when it opened at noon on Thursday, November 8, and left when we were run out eight hours later. You must be in shape to appreciate photography: my phone app says I took 11,000 steps inside the building, and I never sat down because there was no place to sit. The exhibition was jammed with hundreds of lookers, most packing cameras on shoulder straps, and, for reasons I do not understand, taking photos of the photos.
Commercial photography galleries are concentrated in a few countries. At Paris Photo I counted 49 galleries from France, 29 from the United States, 20 from Germany, and 11 from the UK, which means there were only about 50 galleries from the rest of the world. All the U.S. galleries were in New York or California except for outposts in Chicago, Atlanta, and Tucson.
Each gallery showed photos from its country, but also showed popular photographers from anywhere, and you know a photographer is hot when you see their prints in multiple galleries. By that gauge, the 94-year old Robert Frank is the hot photographer this year with his prints in at least five galleries. Surprisingly however, none of the prints were from The Americans, his groundbreaking 1958 photo book. In a real coup, Danziger Gallery in New York used its whole space for a solo show of 40 of Frank’s outtakes from The Americans, all coming from a sale Frank did in order to finance his films. I was not familiar with any of the photos, but it was a discovery and the high point of Paris Photo.
Another major find was seeing all (all!) 71 photos from Bruce Davidson’s 1959 book Brooklyn Gang on one wall at the space of New York’s Howard Greenberg Gallery. Presented in a grid of 8” x 10” prints on an exterior wall of the gallery, it stopped people and created a traffic jam. Davidson said of the gang, the Jokers, “They were poor. They were sad. They were violent. They were sexual. They were full of life.” Which is a most appropriate description of these photos. Books have a linear narrative that progresses by turning the page, but seeing all the photos of a book at one time in a grid allows the eye to flit about and see different combinations of images. It was a rare opportunity, and it was impressive.
The ornate exterior of the Grand Palais with notices for Paris Photo.
Other important shows include the eight large 3’ x 4’ portraits from Richard Avedon’s The American West at Hamilton’s Gallery in London. Larger than life and mounted high on the wall so they looked down at you, the effect was intimidating. Gagosian Gallery dedicated its entire space to the photographs of Andy Warhol and others from Warhol’s Factory, placing them appropriately on walls covered in reflective silver foil. The recently deceased South African photographer David Goldblatt had a one-man show of 35 prints at Goodwin Gallery from Johannesburg which included more of his apartheid work than I had seen before. William Wegman had a fun solo show at Huxley-Parlor from London of studio portraits of his dogs, which might be a cliche were Wegman not so inventive of constantly new situations; how does he get a Weimaraner to pose in a dress?
One hot trend was Japanese photographers, seen in multiple galleries. Their style is what I call brutal: small format, grainy, high-contrast black-and-white, often out of focus and blurred, and often of trivial subjects. It is an in-your-face style that can shock and convey emotion, but I tire of it quickly. The name seen most often was Daido Moriyama (more about him in my next two blogs), but there were a bunch of others unknown to me, presumably younger photographers, continuing in the same tradition. Other classic Japanese photographers, like Sugimoto and Araki, were seen in smaller numbers. All the Japanese photographs at Paris Photo were in black-and-white, understandable because it facilitates their brutal casual style, but someday a Japanese photographer is going to discover color and create something new.
Overall, black-and-white was the standard for prints at Paris Photo, and I estimate that only a third of the prints in the Grand Palais were in color. That is largely because the stock and trade of the art market is for well-known photographers with large bodies of work and several iconic images. In order to achieve such long-time recognition a photographer had to be active in the last century when black-and-white was standard, and before digital printing made color common. However, that doesn’t explain why even photographers known for their color work, like Guy Bourdin, were shown in black-and-white. Color still has a way to go in the photographic art world. Those black-and-white prints were generally 8” x 10”, 11” x 14”, or 16” x 20,” with the latter size a practical limit for many 35mm analog darkrooms. Digital color prints exhibited were larger, designed to compete with large paintings, and were by younger photographers.
About half the prints exhibited had prices listed, and maybe a quarter of those were marked around 1,200 euros ($1,360). All the other prices were higher, and prints without prices were higher still. The biggest price tags I saw were for an Edward Weston contact print “Nude Study IV, Mexico” for 260,000 euros ($294,000), and William Eggleston’s classic red ceiling and light bulb in Greenwood, Mississippi, for $285,000.
That is what was at Paris Photo. It is interesting what was not there, such as only a couple of prints by Lee Friedlander, Sabastiao Salgado, and Cindy Sherman, photographers who could challenge Frank, Eggleston, and Davidson for the title of greatest living photographer. Two years ago, when I was last at Paris Photo, Friedlander and Garry Winogrand were hot. Thankfully, Berndt and Hilla Becker’s boring industrial grids were seen only twice, and indeed there was no evidence of photographers from the Dusseldorf School; two years ago they were everywhere.
That was a lot of what I saw at Paris Photo, but there was much more: artist talks, book signings, and a separate area devoted to photo books and publishers, which I will cover in the next blog.