After three years squeezed into temporary pop-up accommodation, the annual Paris Photo Fair returned to its usual home this year, taking over the 21,000 m2 space of the refurbished and recently reopened Grand Palais for its 27th edition, bigger than ever.
Widely regarded as the most important international art photo event, Paris Photo 2024 showcased 240 exhibitors from 34 countries, up from 191 last year and 181 in 2022.
Pulling in a record 80,000 visitors this year over the four days of the fair, it’s a grande kermesse for the great and good of the art, film and photo worlds. Photographers Martin Parr and Rania Matar, installation artists Zineb Sedira and Isaac Julian, (below) fashion designer and film producer Michèle Lamy were just a few of the luminaries scoping out the show on preview day.
Among the highlights:
A celebration of the centenary of André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto in 34 surrealist-influenced photos selected by guest curator Jim Jarmusch, including works by David Hockney, Man Ray, Peter Hujar, and Robert Frank.
Elle x Paris Photo, a programme dedicated to women photographers, curated this year by art critic and curator Raphaëlle Stopin. A partnership with the French Culture Ministry and François Pinault’s Kering luxury fashion group, it showcased works by 44 women and financed solo and group shows by four galleries. Almost 40 per cent of the photographers at this year’s fair were women, nearly double their presence six years ago when the programme started.
Photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank, who died in 2019 at 94, is best known for his road-trip photo book, The Americans, published in 1959. His surrealist photography has also won recognition, but his film work has remained a little-known secret for decades. German publisher Gerhard Steidl has filled that gap with Film Works, an eight-DVD set of Frank’s complete films and an accompanying book presented at the fair.
São Paulo gallery Vermelho showed Swiss-born Brazilian photographer Claudia Andujar. Curated by the Fóto Mexico festival founder Elena Navarro, it highlighted her experimentalism and human rights activism in support of the Amazon rainforest’s Yanomami people. Her work was featured at the entrance of The Grand Palais, and her series A Sonia (1971) is currently on display at Montparnasse Bienvenue metro station.
London gallery Rocket gave its stand to Martin Parr, celebrating the 25th anniversary of his 1999 series on international consumerism. It also launched the latest Martin Parr photo book, No Smoking.
M77 gallery, Milan, had photographs by the modernist designer Charlotte Perriand, including some previously unshown works from the archive held by her daughter Pernette, said curator Enrica Vigano.
Tanit Gallery of Beirut and Munich showed work by Lebanese/American photographer Rania Matar. Matar was inspired by the resilience and solidarity of Lebanese women facing an endless struggle to survive wars, devastation, and societal collapse. In portraits chronicling the lives of girls and women amid the destruction, “I find the beauty that still exists,” she says.
Warsaw’s Raster Gallery proposed a dialogue between Aneta Grzeszykowska and Zofia Rydet, two acclaimed artists from different generations. Rydet, born in 1974, uses surreal photomontage to explore the female universe. Grzeszykowska, who died in 1997 at the age of 86, created darkly humorous self-portraits that probe feminism, sexuality, and the construction and erasure of the self. The shared social and existential reflection is alarming.
Among reported sales, a Hiroshi Sugimoto at San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery for €500,000; a Massimo Vitali at Edwynn Houk of New York for €73,000; a Larry Sultan at Thomas Zander of Cologne for €58,00; and a Perriand self-portrait, posing bare-backed and arms raised above an Alpine glacier, at M77, for €34,000.