Last month, I was fortunate to spend three days at Paris Photo. It was my first time to attend this “largest international art fair” and I was overwhelmed.

First by the venue, the Grand Palais des Beaux-Arts: The fair has traditionally taken place in the Grand Palais, but not since 2020, when the building was closed for four years of renovations. Built in 1897 for the 1900 Paris Exposition (along with its smaller sibling across the street, the Petit Palais), it looms between the Champs-Élysées and the Seine, resembling, with its continuous glazed, domed roof, a giant’s greenhouse. Inside, 828,000 square feet of sunlight-flooded open space, arranged like a cathedral with Quire, Nave and Transept, take your breath away. Sweeping marble stairways, mosaic floors and elegant, decorative green iron construction imbue it with palatial grandeur exceeding that of a mere convention center.

The second thing that overwhelmed me was the sheer size of the fair. This year there were 244 exhibitors from Africa, North and South America, Asia and Europe — 140 traditional galleries, 44 book publishers, 23 emerging galleries and artists, as well as exhibitors in the categories Digital, Voices and Prismes. Having been in the throes of completing my own first photo book during the time I visited the fair, it was daunting and humbling to see the hundreds of new photography books presented in the publisher’s booths.

Appropriate to the size of the fair’s content, the third thing that overwhelmed me was the number of visitors. Open to the public by admission fee from Thursday through Sunday, the line to get into the fair on Friday was already stretching 350 yards around the building. Some 60,000 visitors attend the fair each year, and, as opposed to the greying world of classical music lovers that I know so well as a professional musician, the average age of the photography enthusiasts I saw was clearly in the young adult to middle age range. And they weren’t collectors (those had been there on Wednesday already), but rather young people of all types, speaking all languages, interested in seeing what was happening in the world of art photography. The message to me was: The world of our passion, photography, is alive and well — very well.

Surprising and encouraging to me as a film photographer was the enormous number of analog prints I saw in my wanderings through the displays of galleries large and small from New York, Tokyo, London, Paris, and many corners of the globe. Alongside well-known images of Cartier-Bresson, Arbus, Stieglitz, Kertész, Leitner, etc. were less-known artists from South America and Asia and young, emerging talents from around the world, all using analog processes. Silver gelatine, silver chlorobromide, platinum/palladium, wet-collodion, carbon, cyanotype, polaroid, cibachrome, c-type, as well as prints made with archival pigments on exclusive Japanese papers — examples were visible in every direction from every spot on the main floor.

Already at the entry to the fair, one was greeted by an impressive wall with the 619 gelatine silver prints of August Sander’s conceptual series “People of the 20th Century.” Sander wanted to depict the structure of German society of the first half of the 20th century — from farm children to the homeless to academics to the Grand Duke — by means of hundreds of individual and group portraits taken by him between 1892 and 1954. He divided them into forty-nine portfolios, which he assigned to seven societal groups: The Farmer, The Skilled Tradesman, The Woman, Classes and Professions, The Artists, The City, and The Last People.

Sanders never completed the project, so his grandson, Gerd Sander, took on the completion in the mid-1980s and worked on it for fifteen years. The portraits were beautifully reprinted by Gerd Sander and Jean-Luc Differdange in the 1990s from the original negatives. Now Julian Sander, the photographer’s great-grandson, is exhibiting the completed project through his Galerie Julian Sander in Cologne, Germany. (One can find a low-resolution documentation of the older prints of the whole collection here: https://md20jh.augustsander. org/)

The prominence and importance of this immense collection of analog photographs greeting all 60,000 visitors as they entered the fair underscores the short history of the photographic art, the role portraiture has played since the beginning of photography, and the enduring legitimacy of the analog process in the current photographic world.

Smaller in scope were solo shows of film photographers presented by galleries. The largest one was of work by the German photographer Herbert List. Galerie Vallois devoted their space to William Wegman’s giant 24×20 inch Polaroids of his longsuffering Weimaraner dogs, Man Ray and Fay Ray posed in various costumes and un-canine-like poses. Gallery M77 showed works of Charlotte Perriand, Rocket Gallery had wall-sized chromogenic prints of the British proletariat by Martin Parr. These to just name four out of many, not to mention the numerous duo-shows.

Another impressive exhibit was a collection of Lithuanian film photography, mainly from the 1980s and 90s, presenting an overview of a post-soviet Lithuanian school of photography. It was organized with the participation of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Centre Pompidou, and the Lithuanian Photographers Association, and curated by Sonia Voss. I was fascinated by this impressive body of important work, whose existence had escaped me till now. An example is this mesmerizing image by Vitaly Butyrin (1947-2020).

While Paris Photo was drawing its tens of thousands of visitors, the city was simultaneously hosting at least six other photo events, including PhotoSaintGermain and Polycopies photo book fair. PhotoSaintGermain was particularly fascinating, with photography exhibits shown in some thirty-five decentralized venues in the famous left bank quartier of Saint Germain.

Paris in November is truly a mecca for photographers. Among the 60’000 visitors this year were Brigitte Lacombe, Phil Penman, Michael Kenna, Jeffrey Conley, Jim Jarmusch, and even FRAMES editor-in-chief Tomasz Trzebiatowski, to name just a few. It was my first visit, but it won’t be my last. I’ll look forward to meeting you there next year!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Smith is a professional choral and orchestral conductor and an amateur photographer and linguist. His photographic interests are in analog medium and large formats. Born and raised in the USA, he has lived as a dual-national in Switzerland for 40 years.

WEBSITE
INSTAGRAM