“What I loved at Paris Photo” allows me to choose, among the thousands of images, the ones that haven’t left me, that followed me out of the Grand Palais. What a pleasure to wander through such an exquisite space. The images have never been so happy and so beautiful!
I tried, like Roald Dahl in Someone Like You, to eavesdrop on their conversations. In a diptych by Viviane Sassen, a man and a woman turn their ebony faces towards the sun in the middle of summer. And in the architectural braids of J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere.
Certains images exist together, support and depend on each other, like the Lewis Baltz’s wall pictures. It’s the opposite for Saul Leiter’s photographs, which breathe a satisfied solitude, or the gracious basketball player by Richard Avedon. And then there’s the pride we see in the elegant portraits of Maasai warriors by Mirella Ricciardi.
Even the scarification in a print by Irvin Penn exudes not pain but power.
Finally, in the work of Bob Gosani, childhood laughed in my face. Today, a few thousand kilometers from Paris, I took the voice of Africa with me.
Sonia Sieff
