It’s no coincidence that “November” brings“amazement”. And what better place to be surprised than the endless aisles of the Grand Palais which is currently hosting Paris Photo? This edition is particularly dense: 220 exhibitors and, under the impetus of its director Florence Bourgeois, a real desire to open the stage up to new kinds of writing and new ways of seeing.
Choosing among these thousands of images is therefore no easy task, but the exercise demands it. Fortunately, here choosing doesn’t mean giving anything up except perhaps the time it takes to write the following lines. Phew!
My walk began with a photograph that stopped me in my tracks. A promising start! It is by Marilyn Minter and is titled Antifreeze. You see a face hidden behind a misted-up pane of glass. At the top you can make out the green of the hair; lower down, pink takes over, that of an open mouth sketching a kiss. The treatment? At once pop and hyperrealist. The whole thing seized my gaze and forced me into a face-to-face with it for several minutes, almost hypnotised.
A few metres further on, at Poetic Space, I discovered the series Doppelopment by the photographer Hiroshi Nomura. On the same wall several images show the same two little girls—twins at first glance—in everyday scenes: in the park, in the street, in the bathroom, asleep in a bed. And then, hanging alone on the adjacent wall, the isolated portrait of one of them. Together they create a slight sense of vertigo: this solitary image, confronted with the duo, suggests an absence, a rupture at any rate, something that feels off. The gallerist explained to me that the artist uses his only daughter as a model, then later, by compositing images, creates her imaginary “double”. A touching work on perception, identity, and that blurred zone where fiction infiltrates reality.
Third stop: Sheila Metzner at Galerie Rouge. Two photographs in particular drew me in. Flowers catch my eye. Black Tulip and White Tulip, read the labels. A softness and sensuality emanated from them, due in particular to a special lighting that gives the image an almost painterly quality. I soon learned that it involves the Fresson process, a rare type of printing that saturates the colours and adds a slight blur. It feels like a dreamt scene, at once simple and highly controlled. That is, in any case, the impression I had as I also looked at a small photograph in the artist’s archives—a nude woman seen from behind—which the gallerist kindly pulled out of a box for me. Sublime!
I continued on to Cob, where the gallery, as in 2024, was showing Jack Davison, who this year returned to what lies at the heart of his work: portraiture. Shot in London over three days, this new series brings together eighty-seven people spotted in the street. Here Davison explores the photopolymer gravure process, which gives his images an almost sculptural depth. You can in fact admire one of them on the fair’s official poster. The installation on the stand formed an arc of faces, in which the individual and the collective echo one another.
In the Voices section, I was struck by the photographs of Felipe Romero Beltrán, presented by Hatch & Klemm’s. The Colombian photographer captured here the suspended time of migration without ever showing it head-on: abandoned objects, empty rooms, restrained gestures, gazes held in suspense… in the shadow of an uncertain crossing. This series, titled Bravo, moves forward through voids and traces, in an aesthetic that speaks as much of fragility as of the strength of those who live on the riverbank, on the edge of what might be.
In short, all of this could be discovered at Paris Photo, among many other marvels besides. See you next year!
Marine Aubenas
