photo exhibitions

Paris Photo, Part 1: What’s Hot and What’s Not in Photography, November 30, 2018, by Ed Malcik

     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.

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.

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.  



Paris Photo, Part 2: Photo Books and Lectures, November 28, 2018, by Ed Malcik

     Paris Photo, the annual gathering in the French capital of international photography galleries, is more than framed photos on walls, as described in my previous blog.  It is a multi-ring circus of all things photographic, with the exception of hardware and software.  After the sale of photographic prints, it is the sale of photography books that dominates the commerce of art photography, and photo books had a large presence at Paris Photo.  I was there this year on November 8, and this is what I saw.

     Thirty-one publishers had booths showing their books in print, often with their editors present.  A couple of the publishing big boys, Taschen and Steidl, were there, but most were smaller companies, like Dewi Lewis, Hatje Cantz, and Kehrer, and they had the really interesting stuff.  If you want to see some cool examples of what a photography book can be, check out British photographer Dougie Wallace’s website www.dougiewallace.com  and note the four books he has published with Dewi Lewis, such as Road Wallah.  They are excellent.  

Joel Meyerowitz signing his book Cape Light at Paris Photo.

Joel Meyerowitz signing his book Cape Light at Paris Photo.

    In conjunction with both publishers and galleries there were over 250 book signings, and it seemed like every photographer still alive was there signing books.  I found it difficult to keep track of time while looking at the galleries, and then I had to sprint to a signing at the other end of the hall.  Still, on the Thursday I went I got to see Joel Meyerowitz signing Cape Light, and the aging William Klein sign William+Klein, although because of Klein’s rock-star status I couldn’t get through the mob of photo groupies to see much.  I also saw Harry Gruyaert signing small 6” x 6” prints at the Magnum gallery.  On the days I did not attend, here is a who’s who of the photographers signing: Frank Horvat, Susan Meiselas, John Gossage, Antoine d’Agata, Chris Killip, Daido Moriyama (him again), Todd Hido, Ralph Gibson, Sophie Calle, Richard Kalvar, Michael Kenna, and Sarah Moon.  There were also a couple hundred others I had never heard of.  

William Klein, the white-haired man at center left, signs his book William+Klein at Paris Photo amidst a crush of fans.

William Klein, the white-haired man at center left, signs his book William+Klein at Paris Photo amidst a crush of fans.

     Ever since the invention of photography, the goal has been to show photographic images on hardcopy materials, usually paper, that could be handled, examined closely, and sold, thus financing a photographer’s work.  For the last 100 years people viewed photos via mass reproduction in publications.  In the middle of the last century newspapers and the great picture magazines like Life and Paris Match brought images to people, and there were a limited number of bound photo books.  Now, with the exception of National Geographic, some special editions of Time, and the glossy fashion magazines, the periodical world is diminishing, and it is the popular photo book that is ascendent in disseminating serious photography.  With the advent of inexpensive digital printing by companies like Blurb there is a profusion of photographers printing their own books (although few can mass market them), and we are in a golden age of photo books.  Yeah, yeah, I hear you: what about digital collections of photographs replacing bound books made of dead trees?  Answer: We ain’t there yet Dorothy.  It can happen, but first someone must figure a way to make money from digital books; there must be some easy way to find the really good digital collections in the ocean of images on the Internet, possibly via subscription services or contests; paper-based books must become too expensive; and we must become so acceptive of seeing digital images that we don’t miss the tactile, sensual, appreciation of the printed page.  About the last point, remember that in Star Trek, set a couple hundred years in the future, all official Star Fleet written communication is electronic, yet when Captain Picard reads for pleasure, he goes to his library of paper-based books: the point being that even in the future the printed image can be expected to provide a superior experience to the digital image.  

Harry Gruyaert signs small 6”x 6” prints of his photos at the Magnum Booth during Paris Photo.

Harry Gruyaert signs small 6”x 6” prints of his photos at the Magnum Booth during Paris Photo.

    So, in this golden age of photo book profusion and confusion, contests are one way to identify the good stuff.  Photography book awards have been given out over the last 18 years by at least a dozen organizations, but the big kahuna is the one given by the Aperture Foundation in conjunction with Paris Photo which has been going on since 2012.  This year 983 books were entered in that competition, the largest number, 273, coming from the United States.  The shortlisted candidates were on display at Paris Photo in three categories: First PhotoBook, Photography Catalogue, and PhotoBook of the Year, most of them chained to a counter where you could look through them.  The problem was that everyone wanted to look at them, and the crush was great, but I got some impressions.  Most of the books in the First PhotoBook group were personal narratives illustrated by photos, with the emphasis on telling the story and not on classically composed decisive moments.  For example, Chinese photographer Pixy Liao’s book Experimental Relationship, Vol. 1 viewed her relationship with her boyfriend with staged color photographs where she always has the dominant position.  The catalog category had more conventional books, which might be expected of catalogs of exhibitions by known photographers like Sally Mann and Susan Meiselas.  The PhotoBook of the Year category fell between the other two in terms of experimentation, ranging from the more classically edited Seeing Deeply a retrospective of Dawoud Bey’s photography, and Look It’s Getting Sunny Outside!!! by Sohrab Hura chronicling the last days of the photographer’s mother and her relationship with her dog.  Bey’s book is finely bound on good paper, while Hura’s is printed on coarse paper with handwritten text and simple binding.  The text in almost all the shortlisted books was in English.

     Another part of Paris Photo had talks by photographers, but unfortunately none of the ones I wanted to hear were on the day I was there, such as the conversation between Simon Baker of the European Museum of Photography and Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama (him again).  I would really, really like to have heard Joel Meyerowitz and Tod Papageorge speaking, presumably about their time shooting on New York’s streets with Garry Winogrand in the 60s where they would bump into Lee Friedlander and Robert Frank.  Oh, the stories they could tell. 

     That was just one action-packed day at Paris Photo.  It was exhilarating.  It was exhausting.  It was Paris.  When my wife and I walked outside at 8:00 pm, the cold was bracing.  We walked across the Seine to a cafe near Les Invalides, and over glasses of wine talked about all we had seen.  Then we walked the short distance to our 9:00 dinner reservation at La Fontaine de Mars, ordered oeufs mayonnaise, cassoulet, fromage, and a bottle of Crozes-Hermitage, talked some more, and caught the #96-bus back to our hotel in the Marais, passing the Sorbonne, Notre Dame Cathedral, and getting occasional views of the Eiffel Tower.  The photo part of Paris Photo was grand, but so was the Paris part.  

     In my next blog I will tell about photography shows by JR, Willy Ronis, Martine Franck, Daido Moriyama (him again) and Dorothea Lange taking place in Paris at the same time as Paris Photo.  




Paris Photo, Part 3: Other Photo Shows, November 26, 2018, by Ed Malcik

     This is the last blog in a series of three about photography exhibitions in Paris, France, while I was there in November 2018.  The first two blogs were about Paris Photo, the world’s biggest show of art photography.  This blog is about all the other photography shows going on at the same time.  

Ed Malcik surrounded by back-lit fashion photos by Daido Moriyama in a tiny pop-up gallery sponsored by Yves Saint-Laurent.

Ed Malcik surrounded by back-lit fashion photos by Daido Moriyama in a tiny pop-up gallery sponsored by Yves Saint-Laurent.

     Museums and galleries in Paris ride the coattails of Paris Photo and organize their own photography exhibitions, and I keep a list of the ones I want to see.  But my wife and I literally stumbled on an amazing show in the Palais Royale, a sprawling 17th century complex of shops and apartments.  We were on our way to dinner at Maceo, and we cut through the beautiful garden of the Palais.  There in a courtyard was a translucent white plastic rectangular box bathed in light.  We walked over.  A banner explained that this was an exhibition called Self by the Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama (him again) organized by the Yves Saint Laurent fashion organization.  It was an unannounced pop-up photo gallery in a prestigious location (read expensive) for only three days.  The gallery was the size of a couple of large cargo containers with two doors.  The black-suited guards invited us in.  I had not seen anything like it before: the walls, ceiling, and floor were covered in high-contrast 11” x 14” black-and-white photos covered in plexiglass, and back-lit so that the pictures and indeed the whole interior glowed.  Now, this is going to sound stupid, but I was so surprised by the unusual setting—I’m not used to looking at photos under my feet—that it was hard to think about the photographs themselves; I remember the entirety of the exhibition more than individual pictures, the forest more than the trees.  The pictures were shot at night in Japan in street-photography style, but, odd for Moriyama, not so rough or out of focus.  Looking closer at the pictures, I realized the people in them were models whom my wife said were wearing Saint Laurent designs, and then I realized that the photos were from a fashion shoot.  Occasionally there was a photo of a flower that was almost pretty—not a typical Moriyama subject.  There were maybe 30 different pictures that were repeated to fill the space.  I couldn’t help but think of the costs involved in designing the concept, building the box, paying some sort of nasty rent for the prestigious space, and then not have many people see it because the show was not announced—what’s with that?  Why keep something like this secret?  And then take it all back to the warehouse after three days.  Amazing.  Curious.  This was Paris Photo dancing with Paris fashion.  It’s a helluva town.

     Now for something completely different at the Museum of European Photography.  While the venue is a typical museum, the photos were printed on ships, trains, houses and walls by the French photographer and designer JR.  If you don’t know who he is you haven’t been paying attention.  Most of his projects involve shooting distorted wide-angle photos of people in poverty or conflict zones mugging for the camera, and then pasting the prints 100-feet tall on buildings where they live, the idea being that from these simple and funny photos that show no evidence of poverty or conflict, everyone just looks human.  JR won the TED prize in 2011, was nominated for a documentary Oscar in 2018 for his film Faces Places, and shot the photos for last month’s excellent special edition of Time on guns in America.  His Paris exhibition showed several projects.  One room had a large model container ship with a gantry crane loading shipping containers that had sections of a huge face pasted on the sides.  Initially with only a few containers the face was unrecognizable, but after a while it came together.  Then the cranes removed the containers and the face dissolved.  A photo showed the ship underway as a face sliding across the sea.  Another room had a model of an East African hillside village where JR had pasted huge photos of faces on houses.  The faces are missing the eyes, but then a train comes through with eyes pasted to containers, and for a brief instant the faces and eyes come together in a complete face.  If I was amazed at the expense and complexity of the Saint Laurent/Moriyama fashion box, thinking about the organization and management JR needs for his projects is next to mind boggling, and the museum showed letters to companies and governments, project designs, organization charts, and expense sheets.  Makes the problems with your pet photo project pale in comparison, doesn’t it?  

     I know it is not polite to start describing the photography exhibition of photographer Martine Franck by talking about her husband, but I will anyway because her husband was the greatest photographer of the 20th century, and her exhibition was held at the museum named for him, the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson.  Franck was born in Belgium, grew up in the UK and United States, and became a photojournalist for the big picture magazines.  When she first met Cartier-Bresson he is supposed to have used one of the best pick-up lines any photographer ever used, “Martine, I want to come see your contact sheets.”  It worked, they married in 1970, and in 1983 she became a Magnum photographer.  Her exhibition was an extensive retrospective, covering the whole floor of the new museum for which her show is the museum’s first at its new location in the Marais, only opening this autumn in time for Paris Photo.  Her photos are reserved, thoughtful, and without conflict.  Unlike many of the Magnum photographers she didn’t cover war or political strife, and instead concentrated on humanitarian issues like schoolboys in a Nepalese Buddhist monastery, the residents of a small Irish island to which she returned many times, and portraits of artists and writers.  Hers are well done, quiet pictures that hold your attention when viewing them in sequence, but few are remembered afterward.  Some of her better known pictures are of her husband drawing, which he did later in life after giving up photography. 

The Paris museum showing the photographic exhibition “Willy Ronis by Willy Ronis.”

The Paris museum showing the photographic exhibition “Willy Ronis by Willy Ronis.”

     I am a big fan of the humanist French photographer Willy Ronis, who developed delightful compositions of people on the street, and thus I sought out his retrospective in a new museum in the working class Bellville area of the 20th arrondissement.  As museums go this one has the area pretty much to itself.  The exhibition, “Willy Ronis by Willy Ronis,” was in the 18th-century Pavillion Carre de Baudouin not far from where Ronis lived, and right in the middle of where he regularly photographed.  A video showed him walking around the neighborhood talking about where he took his popular pictures and how the area had changed.  Ronis died in 2009 at age 99.  The exhibition was large and, of course, included his better-known images such as the boy running down the street with a baguette under his arm, the “Nude Provencal” of a young woman with her back turned at a sink before an open window (which was Ronis’ wife), the kissing couple atop the Bastille column, the two boys playing in an empty barge sailing down the Seine, and the little girl in Venice crossing a plank onto a boat.  While I was familiar with all those, I hadn’t seen his political pictures of labor strikes, and I hadn’t known that he was a lifelong supporter of leftist causes.  

     The one major exhibition I did not see in Paris was the Dorothea Lange retrospective at the Jeu de Plume because I saw it a couple of months earlier when it was at the Barbican in London.  It was spectacular, showing a greater variety of her work than I had seen before, as well as a small room dedicated to different versions of her most famous picture, “Migrant Mother,” and how she worked hard in the darkroom to remove a distracting thumb from the mother’s left hand that was around the child.  

A poster in a laundromat advertises the exhibition of Dorothea Lange’s photography at the Jeu de Plume Museum in Paris by using her most famous picture, “Migrant Mother.”

A poster in a laundromat advertises the exhibition of Dorothea Lange’s photography at the Jeu de Plume Museum in Paris by using her most famous picture, “Migrant Mother.”

     The one bit of photo seeing that I could have done without was to tour the 36 galleries that were together called Photo Saint Germain.  After all the big shows that I have described above, there was nothing, nothing that caught my eye in the galleries of the 6th arrondissement, including the Josef Sudek show at the Centre Tcheque de Paris.  But, it was a beautiful sunny day, and it is always fun to walk around the Saint Germain area with its cafes, including my favorite, La Palette, where we spent the evening with a bottle of wine and a cheese plate.