The archive, the vernacular, the series, reality kept at bay (photojournalism is practically absent), and subversion of the very essence of the photographic medium are some major trends observed at Paris Photo. Below you will find an overview of artists who explore the porosity between substance and form, who open new fields of innovation, return to materiality against the advances in digital technology and resist the built-in obsolescence of the virtual age.
Daido Moriyama
A seminal body of work which had a great impact in Japan as well as in the West, brought together in the definitive, complete series Farewell Photography, is a major event at Paris Photo (Sector Prismes). Conceived as a total, protean work of art, these frenzied, raw shots of Tokyo streets left a mark on an entire photographic avant-garde around the Provoke movement, before the photographer decided to burn a portion of his negatives.
Lukas Hoffmann
Drawing inspiration from the German Romantic landscape theorized by Carl Gustav Carus, Lukas Hoffman seeks to restore the original order giving it a semblance of neutrality. He uses the silver gelatin process to gain better control over his prints. Between the formal rigor and the intuition of the moment, the macrocosm and microcosm of nature reassert their rights!
Rachel de Joode
Between digital patchwork and organic collage, Rachel de Joode embodies a new generation of artists who explore inventive, iconoclastic materialities bringing friction and porosity into the heart of the process. The artist employs a visual language in which the performative aspect and the mise-en-scène between photography and objects, the body of the artist and her preferred materials to produce a trompe-l’oeil effect.
Panos Tsagaris
Since the beginning of the Greek financial crisis, the artist has been collecting front pages of newspapers featuring the turmoil wracking his country. He pastes gold leaf over the text, leaving only the shocking news image uncovered. Performing an operation of reversal starting with the symbolism of gold, which is immutable and incorruptible, the artist also draws on the tradition of Byzantine icons. By restoring it, he revisits the glorious past of his ancestors.
Adrian Sauer
Playing on the idea of the obsolescence of a boxed edition of the image editing software Photoshop (a format now hard to find), the artist confronts reproducibility and the principle of unity. In response to the changing status of contemporary photography, Sauer explores the basic morphology of digital images by creating anachronistic situations involving technical texts and concrete photographs. The semantics are an integral part of his reflection.
Delphine Balley
Taking as a starting point her family mythology (Album de famille) or a trending news item (Goût du crime), Delphine Balley intertwines reality and fiction. She turns empty sites into stage sets for her stories—vernacular memories filled with signs to be deciphered. Cinema, popular culture, and the fairy tale are a pretext for enigmatic, unsettling dramatizations that reach into the depths of the human soul and penetrate its secrets.
Matthew Brandt
Matthew Brandt privileges the early photographic techniques, such as salt paper or gum bichromate printing, and temporal experiments. He submits photography to the action of water, infusing the images with new colors which he combines with the physical elements of whatever is photographed, for example a fragment of lace. In the tradition of great landscape photographs, the alteration of the surface of the image imitates the process of erosion.
Xu Yong
The 35 mm negatives, converted into positives using your smartphone, were taken by a witness to the Tiananmen Square events in spring 1989, and are a form of resistance that counters the Chinese government’s wave of amnesia regarding these tragic events. To publish these images in this format has more impact once the color palette reveals the emotions and signs of protest in the faces of the crowd. The book accompanying this design choice is sober and effective and becomes a tangible, symbolic trace of the struggle.
FAIR
Paris Photo 2015
November 12th-15th, 2015
Grand Palais
Paris
France
www.parisphoto.com
