Insider’s Guide to Paris Photo
Paris Photo is a masterclass in the trends, concerns and innovations of the global visual culture conversation. My virtual experience of Paris Photo went well beyond my expectations. While I wholeheartedly missed the camaraderie, excitement and deliciousness of this event in real life, the online viewing room offered a few digital perks. My favorite being the request option for galleries to email information on an artist and/or an individual piece.
I spent days scouring 190 galleries featuring work by artists from 30 countries. I downloaded the 77 page fair catalog and hopped on two Spotify podcasts hosted by Foam Talks and Something We Africans Got, to listen to informed conversations and panels. I congratulate the fair for increasing the work by women to be 34% of the exhibition offerings. The majority (60%) of these were shown in the Curiosa section dedicated to new and emerging work. Noteworthy is of the 16 artists featured on my carousel selection most produced this work in the past year.
This edition of the fair was held in a smaller venue, one built to house events while the Grand Palais is under renovataion. I believe the determination to carry on despite pandemic challenges augmented the intimacy and preciousness of gathering. The overall tenor was work pushing the bounds of the medium with experimentation and innovation and substantial use of new technologies including AI. Subjects were often diaristic with artists creating visual journals in search of meaning. Themes of memory and identity were pervasive, as were the honoroing of ancestry and cultural roots, in a search for foundational understanding of belonging, self and community.
Zora J. Murff in his series ‘American Mother, American Father’ is self reflective, utilizing his own lived experience as a Black man in Arkansas to explore larger issues of race, violence and power. Indian transmedia artist, Poulomi Basu, focuses on marginalization of women and indigenous people in her decades long project, Centralia. In it she highlights existing social justice issues with a docu-fictional lens and a science fiction twist.
Almudena Romero is a British/Spanish artist who challenges our notions of perception, exploitation and accumulation - and the role of photography upon all of it. The winner of the BMW residency, her image-objects occur by light wavelengths acting on the surface of real organic plants, in this case, on watercress, from her grandmother’s garden!
Each year, Pernod Ricard gives a photographer ‘carte blanche’. French photogrpaher, Olivier Culmann, was tasked with capturing the resilience of community and the common desire to overcome the pandemic-induced sense of isolation and anxiety. He chose over 100 French cafe, bar and restaurant workers who kept their communities vibrant by infusing normalcy and hope.
The Curiosa section brings together contemporary cutting edge work and this year featured 21 artists from 17 countries. Curated by Shoair Marlian the work reflected was searingly honest, boldly grappling with the fragility of the human relationship to self, other and the earth.
Outside Paris Photo, the city is alive with photo exhibitions in most major museums and several independent bookfairs. My favorite book stop is Polycopies, a temporary, highly curated collection of small presses on several continents, housed on a barge. Its rooftop cafe/bar is an essential stop. I miss attending the Also Known As Africa fair which hosts educational platforms, booksellers and galleries from countries across the continent of Africa. Vivian Maier was celebrated in her second Paris exhibit at the Musee de Luxembourg. And PhotoSaintGermaine again turned the 6th arrondissement into one large outdoor festival with over 40 galleries celebrating photography and people spilling onto the streets from simultaneous openings.
