ART FAIRS:Paris Photo 2019

Paris Photo is the world’s largest Art Fair of photography, and is held annually since 1997 in the Grand Palais, Paris. The 23nd edition of the Art Fair hosts brings together 213 exhibitors from across the world, offering collectors and enthusiasts the most diverse and qualitative presentation of photography-driven projects today.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Paris Photo Archive

For the 23rd edition of Paris Photo, 213 exhibitors from 31 countries are reunited at the Grand Palais across 5 sectors offering visitors the largest panorama of premium photographic artworks available on the market today. The Sectors are: MAIN GALLERY Sector  – BOOK Sector  – PRISMES – CURIOSA Sector and FILM Sector. Galerie Baudoin Lebon and Etherton Gallery collaborate for a copresentation at Paris Photo in celebration of the 80th birthday of photographer Joel-Peter Witkin. The exhibition presents a group of the most significant images from Witkin’s career. During the American culture wars Witkin, like Robert Mapplethorpe, and Andres Serrano, was singled out for producing “degenerate art.” In reality, for over four decades, Joel-Peter Witkin has made elegant, genre defying photographs that honor the non-mainstream body. He places members of the LGBTQ community, the physically challenged and disabled, women and body parts at the center of photographs, which are informed by references to religion, politics, literature, and references to great artists and photographers. Casemore Kirkeby presents a historical solo presentation of “Raised by Wolves” by Jim Goldberg, comprised of vintage silver gelatin prints, archival pigment prints, and ephemera. Often considered Jim Goldberg’s seminal body of work, “Raised By Wolves” collages ten years of photographs, texts, films and installations into an epic narrative of the lives of runaway teenagers in San Francisco and Los Angeles in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Working in the liminal space between documentary and narrative fiction, Goldberg invented a visual language crafted from home movie stills, snapshots, drawings, diary entries, audio, film, and his subjects’ discarded belongings that stands at the intersection of the documentary tradition, Californian conceptual art movements of the 1970s, and the emerging subjective storytelling of the 1980s. Hauser & Wirth’s inaugural presentation at Paris Photo is a solo presentation of the work of August Sander. The project features rare lifetime prints from the 1920 and 1930s by the late German photographer, a forefather of conceptual art and pioneering documentarian of human diversity. Over the course of a career spanning six decades and tens of thousands of negatives, August Sander created a nuanced sociological portrait of Germany comprising images of its populace.   Atlas presents a juxtaposition of Sixties British photographer Sam Haskins and female German contemporary photographer Frauke Eigen; two artists who have, in very different contexts, both explored the subject of the nude. The Atlas curation offers an overview of their contrasting gaze, across generations and gender. MEM presents a two-person show of work by Yūshi Kobayashi and Noboru Ueki, representative members of KPS (Kyoto Photo Society), an organization founded in 1925. The show features vintage prints, mainly from the 1940s and ’50s, that are never before seen outside of Japan and merit critical reevaluation. At the past three editions of Paris Photo, MEM focused on the two foremost amateur photography clubs in Japan’s Kansai (central-west) region: Naniwa Photography Club (1906–present) and Tampei Photography Club (1930 –1950s), along with their key representatives. Member-based photo clubs served as building blocks in Japan’s early photographic history, particularly in Kansai and western Japan. Numerous visionary artists emerged from such clubs, which celebrated a centuries-long nonconformist tradition rooted in that region. Richard Saltoun presents an exhibition by Gina Pane and Penny Slinger, who emerged during the 1960s – a time of significant political and social upheaval that resulted in greater sexual liberation and rights for women. Each using the female body – typically their own – as her main medium, their approaches were radically different: Pane explored issues of pain, both physical and metaphysical, in her highly-choreographed ‘actions,’ while Slinger celebrated erotica and reclaimed the body as a site of pleasure. Both used photography as a means to record and communicate their artistic aims. The gallery’s presentation at Paris Photo offers an exceptional opportunity to engage with the conflicting and complementary elements of these artists’ work. It features vintage photographs depicting key performances by Pane from the 1970s, shown alongside important photomontages and body prints by Slinger from the same era. It also follows Penny Slinger’s recent collaboration with Dior for the house’s 2019–2020 Autumn-Winter Haute Couture show, where fashion designer and creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri took inspiration from Penny Slinger’s surrealist classic, An Exorcism. Set within an English mansion, An Exorcism explored the inner-workings of the female psyche, sensuality and spirituality. The final look for the collection, designed by Slinger, was a wearable golden doll’s house merging the woman and the house – both alchemically transformed. Xippas Paris presents a group show entitled “Day Versus Night”. Featuring works by Valérie Jouve, Vera Lutter, Vik Muniz, Eric Poitevin, Matthew Porter, Bettina Rheims, the booth focuses on the symbolic power of time. The hallucinatory icy landscapes by Darren Almond, reminiscent of a desert or a seascape, induce a sense of disorientation in space and time. Taken in an area where day and night measure months rather than hours, the photographs question the ambivalent relation between day and night. Vera Lutter’s camera obscura works also question this ambivalence. On her images, New York seems immersed in the darkness of the night. It is, however, the light of day which, transforming zones of light into zones of darkness, has slowly printed its rays on paper. Matthew Porter, in turn, seems to go beyond the polarity of day and night and explores the border between both. Two of his works, using the terms dusk and dawn in their title, painterly depict the gradually changing light. Valérie Jouve also captures the “borderline” between day and night, avoiding any clues. The ambivalence is carried in her works with human figures which could be both embraced by morning light or by early dusk. Eric Poitevin’s still lifes seem to erase time. Whether a skull illuminated by the light of an eternal day or a landscape shrouded in mist, his images create metaphysical spaces. As for the photographs by Bettina Rheims, they depict feminine figures trapped in closed environments. With no access to the outside world or to the source of the natural light, these rooms become places of permissive and indefinite time. A similar uncertainty may be felt in Vik Muniz’s artwork. The light changes on the window stores as it slides through the layers of paper, exploring shades of grey with an Edward Weston-like attention. Inaugurated in 2018, Curiosa is a thematic sector presented by a guest curator. This year dedicated to emerging art, the sector provides collectors with the opportunity to discover new talent while also providing greater access for younger galleries to participate in a leading art fair. Guest curator, Osei Bonsu presents “Vanishing Point / Point de Fuite”, a selection of 14 artists whose work explores our contemporary photo-based culture, highlighting complex issues of visibility, trace and disappearance. The Film sector highlights the relationship between still and moving images in artistic creation. Curated conjointly this year by Matthieu Orléan, artistic advisor at the Cinémathèque française, and Pascale Cassagnau, Head of Audiovisual Collections and New Media, Centre national des arts plastiques (Cnap), programming includes film projects proposed by 2018 exhibitors and selections from the Cnap collection. Located on the first floor, the Book sector brings together this year 33 publishers and art book dealers from 9 countries presenting rare and limited editions, avant-premier book releases and an extensive programme of book signings over the course of the 4 days of the fair.

Info: Paris Photo 2019, Grand Palais, Avenue Winston Churchill, Paris, Duration: 7-11/11/19, Days & Hours: 12:00-20:00 (19:00 Sun), www.parisphoto.com