While it is certainly possible to jump into the middle of our Paris Photo 2015 summary reports and find your way to your favorite galleries, starting at the beginning and working through the booths systematically may make the most sense. Part 1 of our report can be found here, and along with one group of booth reports (the center section), it includes some general background on the fair and the outline of the slideshow format. Part 2 can be found here.
This Part 3 of the report covers the section immediately to the right of the central section, as seen from the main entrance. It might also be called the “middle right”.
Stephen Daiter (here): This 1940s Arthur Siegel photogram is a dense compendium of gears and sprockets. Set against a graph paper-like mesh, its circular forms are layered in thickets. Priced at $10000.
Dix9 – Hélène Lacharmoise (here): This work by Leyla Cárdenas resembles a physical excavation or a moth eaten old blanket. Using multiple images taken of the same Caracas building façade over several months/years, she has layered the pictures into a single structure, with holes cut through to expose what’s underneath. It’s a resonant study of constant urban change, narrowed down to a single specific place. Priced at €7000.
Paci Contemporary (here): This booth was a solo presentation of the work of Sandy Skoglund, complete with a few of her hand crafted sculptures like this red fox (seen on the left in the image hung above it). Long before Photoshop, Skoglund was creating whimsically impossible installations; now that it has become routine to create fantastical scenes, her painstaking work seems all the more prescient. Priced at €40000.
Stephen Bulger (here): Phil Bergerson’s Indiana shop window is a found treasure. Racks of horns echo the crack of the broken window, and the fog on the glass looks like the breath of the taxidermied deer. Priced at €2400.
James Hyman (here): This Harry Callahan portrait of Eleanor from 1948 is unusually large, wrap mounted around the edges, and titled Hot Stuff! on the back. Its dark isolation of her body is unlike most of Callahan’s other portraits of his wife, and perhaps a clue to its rarity. Priced at €68000.
Stills (here): This array of small prints by Trent Parke are is actually a set of tarot cards from his project The Black Rose. Eerie negative tonalities dominate the backyard still lifes, from a rat in a gutter to lawnmowers, dark trees, tadpoles, and a barking dog. Priced at €15000 for the set of 30.
Yancey Richardson (here): Vintage Lewis Baltz works from the New Industrial Parks series continue to increase in value. The pared down geometries and clean tonalities of the building corner, the garage door, and the ladder make this a durably fine example. Priced at $30000.
Sprüth Magers (here): This booth-filling gathering of the works of Bernd and Hilla Becher was planned prior to Hilla’s recent passing, so what was once a survey has become something more like a tribute. This winding tower typology, with its angled girders and its meticulously rotating perspectives, is a classic of precise perception. None of the works on view were for sale, given the changes in the estate.
Air De Paris (here): This isolating roadside image is part of a long term project on migrants housed in camps in Calais by Bruno Serralongue. This large scale print is the last of his rich Ilfachrome prints, given a recent move to digital. Priced at €13000.
Asymetria (here): Mark Piasecki’s triptych of 1950s/1960s doll heads is pleasingly creepy and surreal. The faces seem to multiply like ghosts rising in the air, their eyes doubling again and again. Priced at €4000.
Rocio Santa Cruz (no site): This group of 11 works by Jordi Mitjà was made by projecting images of broken lighthouse glass onto a divided stone tablet. The results are swirlingly abstract, the edges of the shards becoming striated waves, almost like brushwork. Priced at €8000 for the set.
Keith De Lellis (here): Perhaps a stage set or a scale model, this tiny image by Kurt Schwitters is full of bold geometries. Long vertical strips are balanced by semicircles, the strong black and white contrast creating dynamism and vitality. No price, as it was already sold.
Eric Dupont (here): This Nicholas Nixon self portrait of his curly hair and skin reminded me of Cy Twombly. The individual hairs are like looping squiggles in black and white, covering the composition in energetic movement. Priced at €4000.
Fifty One (here): This array of small images from Mt. Fuji by Bruno Roels turns a simple landscape with close up vegetation into a study in flaring tonal variation. As the bushes wash into bright silhouettes, the background oscillates with quiet subtlety. Priced at €3000 for the set of 24 prints.
Parrotta (here): This glossy large scale 1966 photogram by Timm Rautert moves out from a dark central circle into fugues of reflection and distortion. It has a glassy feel, with uncertain depth. Priced at €28000.
East Wing (here): This image by Cortis & Sonderegger recreates the famous Tank Man protest picture using plastic models, transforming a famous political event into a tabletop reenactment. It smartly turns collective memory into a physical process of reconstruction. Priced at €3600.
Françoise Paviot (here): Walker Evans made a series of still life portraits of African masks in the 1930s, and this is one of the best I have seen. Its white swooping form is brashly abstract. Priced at €10000.
David Zwirner (here): Perhaps as a balance to the digital mechanics of his ongoing series of monumental photograms, Thomas Ruff has also been quietly producing a selection of cyanotypes from found image sources. This up close particle tracing has echoes of his mathematical zycles, its spiraling movements seeming to approximate golden/logarithmic proportions. Priced at €8000.
Suzanne Tarasieve (here): While a massive Juergen Teller image of Kim Kardashian on her hands and knees showing off her backside was sucking away all the attention in this booth, Delphine Balley’s muted news item recreations were being overshadowed. This image restages the sadly puzzling story of a woman with Alzheimer’s sitting for 2 days in front of the corpse of her son. Priced at €1600.
Luisotti (here): These Mark Ruwedel images of abandoned houses at dusk glow with luscious rich tonalities. The white edge of a window, the burnt out shell of a hole in a building, they seem to slowly coalesce out of the enveloping darkness. Priced between $4500 and $6500 each.
Daniel Templon (here): This recent David LaChapelle still life mixes a classic floral bouquet with anachronistic details like a broken, blood covered wineglass, outdated cellphones, and an empty Starbucks cup. It’s a “lushness of faded decadence turned dreary” kind of picture. Priced at €22000.
Eric Franck (here): Graham Smith’s week before Christmas picture captures the weary desperation of a strung out mother. Two kids in a pram and a crowd looking for bargains combine to epitomize the madness of the holidays. Priced at €6000.
Carlos Carvalho (here): Roland Fischer’s New Architectures series uses famous buildings as a starting point for further layered rethinking. This image uses Taniguchi’s MoMA as its source, turning it into a meticulous jumble of reflected striping. Priced at €21000.
Sage Paris (here): This soaring look upward at the Eiffel Tower by Germaine Krull is undeniably thrilling. The gestural whipsaw back and forth of the steel feels freshly loose and energetic. Priced at €26000.
Taik Persons (here): Squint your eyes and let your mind wander a bit and perhaps you can see the muse for Niko Luoma’s new all-over abstraction. If the angled arms and pastel pinks of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon come to mind then his tumbling composition of layered polygons successfully made the connection. Priced at €13000.
Polaris (here): Louis Heilbronn’s single frame collection of images depicting a cricket match being played in a dry Indian reservoir is an intriguing exploration of narrative. The pictures circle around the game, telescoping in and out, from close ups of participants to wide views of the old 13th century colonial dam, changing sizes from small to large. The effect is something like innovative narrative in the round in two dimensions, where the story is being told in multifaceted space. Priced at €16000.
Vintage (here): This late 1920s blow-up of scissors by Imre Kinszki makes the hinge of the instrument the visual key rather than its sharpened blades. It’s an intimate example of between-the-wars Modernist precision. Priced at €3500.
Nikolaus Ruzicska (here): This monumental view of Tokyo from Axel Hütte is printed on mirror, creating a nighttime scene that shifts and shimmers in the blurring light. Priced at €45000.
Grundemark Nilsson (here): Dawid’s late 1980s series Rost captured rusty objects and isolated fragments on a light table, creating enigmatic formal studies. They would make a smart counterpoint to a collection of traditional photograms. Priced at €2800.
Gandy (here): This work from Danica Dakić (originally shown at documenta 12) uses a panoramic wallpaper full of round-the-globe metaphorical subjects as a backdrop for a portrait of refugees living in Kassel. Between the peacock in the foreground and the highway overpass in the back, it offers a complex set of cultural allusions and realities. Priced at €13000.
Bo Bjerggaard (here): In this wall sized array of images by Janaina Tschäpe, balloons of various shapes and sizes float on reflective still water, creating contrasts of shape and form. It’s a dream-like series mixing the natural and the man made. Priced at €38000.
