21st Century Highlights from Paris Photo 2024, Part 2 of 6

This is Part 2 of our summary report on the 21st century photography highlights from Paris Photo 2024. Part 1 of the report (here) explains the format used in the detailed slideshow below, provides some background for the discussion, and covers earlier sections of the fair. So while it is certainly possible to jump directly into any one of these individual reports, if you want or need a bit more context, return to Part 1 as a starting point.

Loock (here): The layered kaleidoscopic effect in this 2023 image by Sabiha Çimen seems to allude to the multiple lives of contemporary Islamic women, from covered conservatism to the freedom of eating blue ice cream in public, all within the same female identity. It’s one of the first images from a new series by the Turkish photographer, following up on her successful “Hafiz” (reviewed here in photobook form). Priced at €8000.

Loock (here): The single word UNTIL scrawled on black stairs feels like an ominous message in this recent work by Gregory Halpern, from his series “King, Queen, Knave”. Made in and around the artist’s hometown of Buffalo, New York, the multi-year project mixes portraits, still lifes, and city landscapes into a resonant survey of decline and resilience. Priced at $8500.

Zander (here): In this 2022 work by Tarrah Krajnak, the artist cradles a shaped stone in her hands, her sensual attentiveness to the stone and its feeling captured in her nearby notebook. After holding the rock for more than a minute, she felt the pulse of a river, and heard the laughter of men dismissing her communion with the rock. The femininely shaped stone thus became the “Rock That Drowns Men’s Laughter”. Priced at €6300 for the diptych.

Stieglitz19 (here): The Japanese photographer Daisuke Yokota’s newest color abstractions (from the series “Sludge”) were made by intentionally soaking a thick pack of photographic paper in various chemicals. As the pages were later peeled apart, rich pools and veins of color interrupted the process. In this saturated yellow composition, the colors seem to crust and flare, creating swirled blobs, nested reflections, and areas of tactile brightness. Priced at €4250.

Paris-B (here): This recent lightbox-based work by the Spanish photographer Hector Castells-Matutano smartly uses film strips as collage elements. The composition mixes scale and alignment, via stripes of photogram arrangements, color blocks, jittering film frames, and extended vertical lines, all brought together within the confines of the backlit structure. The work plays with time in intriguing ways, from slices of single large images to tiny frames that aggregate and change. Priced at €3500.

Maubert (here): This booth featured a handful of Nicolas Floc’h’s colorful stacked gradients, in tones of green, blue, orange, and red. The French photographer’s works document the color of the water at different incremental depths in various far-reaching locations around the world; this one captures the electric red of the Red River in Texas, where the red clay tints the water. At once abstract and scientific, and infused with the evolving realities of climate change as seen in these rivers and oceans, the works conceptually offer much more than just eye-poppingly decorative color. Priced at €19000.

Binome (here): This wall-filling grid of works by Guénaëlle de Carbonnières is made up of photograms of images on the French artist’s smartphone. Each work captures a different protest photo, from places like Iran, Hong Kong, Ukraine, and the United States, creating a haunting taxonomy of the visualization of uprising and revolt. Priced at €950 each for the prints, and gathered together in an artist’s photobook priced at €750.

Binome (here): This black-and-white geometric abstraction by the French photographer Baptiste Rabichon started out as a composition in software. But the image was then displayed on a screen and dappled with droplets of water, which sparkle with unexpected rainbows of color, magnifying the backlit pixels that actually make up the seemingly monochrome display. The result offers a connection to elemental shape-based abstractions back in the history of photography, but with a twist of decidedly contemporary technological punch. Priced at €2300.

Binome (here): Laurent Millet’s recent photograms mix natural elements like branches and flowering twigs with more machined boxes and hard-edged quasi-architectural renderings in plexiglas. The French photographer’s images are then presented on lightboxes, adding a ghostly intermingled quality to the intricately layered compositions, like alternate solutions to a single problem. Priced at €5800.

PGI/Third Gallery Aya (here and here): As we start to get a better grasp on the signature images and projects in 21st century photography, Asako Narahashi’s submerged pictures from her project “Half Alseep and Half Awake in the Water” are beginning to cement their place in the emerging canon. This particular photograph, with its engulfing mountain of water and a landing airplane, is a prime example of the feeling of anxiety created by the Japanese photographer’s innovative almost drowning position. Priced at €5800.

Gagosian (here): This booth was a selection of works curated by Tyler Mitchell, placing his images in thoughtful dialogue with those of Richard Avedon. This new work is printed on mirror (and covered in plexi), adding a layer of reflectivity and inclusion to the childhood joy of a splattering hose; since the face is obscured by the flow of water, it offers room for us to enter the picture ourselves. Priced at $50000.

In Situ/Fabienne Leclerc (here): The sunwashed tourist glory of palm trees and garden statuary fills postcards from 1960s and 1970s Beirut, long before the civil war that upended that romantic time. This rephotographed work by the Lebanese artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige scars that honeyed past, with burn marks, spots, and puckered distortions. Priced at €20000.

Archiraar (here): This floral image by the French artist Roman Moriceau offers more process complexity than it might initially suggest. The roses in the bouquet are all appropriated images of now extinct species, gathered together digitally and then printed on a copper plate using recycled silver salts salvaged from other artistic projects. The shimmering image has a seductive end of times mood, with impossible blossoms captured one last time by a misty hint of discarded wastes. Priced at €4000.

Archiraar (here): The serendipity of street photography never ceases to deliver visual surprises, as evidenced by the recent images of the Belgian artist Camille Orso. Here a look inside a garbage bin yields a composition combining the color interplay of crushed cans, the hovering attention of blurred bees, and the swooping curve of the bin edge. Priced at €2500.

Wouter van Leeuwen (here): Cut paper abstractions have a long history in photography, but this recent work by the Dutch photographer Thomas Manneke incorporates a different sense of collaborative intimacy. The cut holes in this cardboard box were made together with the artist’s daughter (as part of the larger pandemic era project “Zillion”), leading to a meditative interior space punctuated by elegant lights and darks. Priced at €3900.

Wouter van Leeuwen (here): This 2023 image of tires by Bryan Schutmaat follows up his intimate 2023 photobook County Road (reviewed here). Schutmaat has long been a superlative black-and-white image maker/printer, and this dark sea of circular forms has all the tactile hallmarks of his attentive eye. Priced at €10900.

Jean-Kenta Gauthier (here): The swirling geometries in this recent work by Raphaël Dallaporta were made using LED lights hanging from a double pendulum. Like Berenice Abbot’s earlier photographic documentations of scientific phenomena, the resulting work feels gracefully elemental, as though revealing some inner truth within its rotating nest of lines. Priced at €17000.

Intervalle (here): Leveraging a lifetime of learnings from his family’s printing factory, Jean-Vincent Simonet has built up a compelling photographic practice driven by deliberately upending traditional printing techniques. This image looks upward into the trees of Omotesando in Tokyo, but dissolves into a pricked painterly sparkle. Simonet’s process involves printing on plastic coated sheets and then allowing the layers of ink to drip, sink, and wash away, creating a photographic aesthetic that feels surprisingly fluid and expressive. Priced at €5000.

TOBE (here): This booth featured several bodies of work from the Romanian photographer Kincsõ Bede. This 2022 image comes from the series “The Art of Pista”, which references the disruptive force of the artist’s grandfather, via images of female family members (including the artist herself) in hand knitted hats, mittens, and other garments. Here the disruption is turned around, protecting the subject and interrupting the viewer. Priced at €2500.

TOBE (here): The Guatemalan photographer Juan Brenner is working on a new project called “This Universe”, which wrestles with questions of memory and family history. Here deflated chewing gum balloons metaphorically allude to abandoned memories left to decay. It’s an engaging visual representation of old thoughts (and ways of thinking) deliberately left behind. Priced at €2800.

Poetic Scape (here): Toshio Shibata has made many memorable landscapes of this kind of erosion control intervention (particularly in black-and-white), but here again in 2021, we find him returning to this subject, now in color. The grid form lushly undulates across the surface of the land, creating a tactile covering that resembles pixelization. Priced at €3400.

Carlos Carvalho (here): This work from the German photographer Jessica Backhaus comes from her recent series “The Nature of Things”. It’s a straightforward project steeped in close looking at overlooked objects, like these fruits seen in dappled light and with doubled shadows. Matted in bold blue, the image reveals layers of nuance discovered in simplicity. Priced at €3800.

Carlos Carvalho (here): The French photographer Marguerite Bornhauser has made an artistic name for herself with her bold use of saturated color. In her new series “We are Melting”, she leaves behind representation to use color to evoke the heat and cold of climate change, using the beginnings and ends of film rolls as her subject matter. In this sensuously blue work, interlocked strips of paint on glass float above the photographic spectrum, creating a hovering layered effect in deep intense color. Priced at €6500.

Subsequent parts of this report will cover different physical sections of the fair, with the booths found in the far right of the main floor up next.

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Read more about: Asako Narahashi, Baptiste Rabichon, Bryan Schutmaat, Camille Orso, Daisuke Yokota, Gregory Halpern, Guénaëlle de Carbonnières, Hector Castells-Matutano, Jessica Backhaus, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Juan Brenner, Kincsõ Bede, Laurent Millet, Marguerite Bornhauser, Nicolas Floc'h, Raphaël Dallaporta, Roman Moriceau, Sabiha Çimen, Tarrah Krajnak, Thomas Manneke, Toshio Shibata, Tyler Mitchell, Archiraar, Carlos Carvalho Contemporary Art, Gagosian Gallery, Galerie Binome, Galerie Loock, Galerie Maubert, Galerie Thomas Zander, Galerie Wouter van Leeuwen, In Situ/Fabienne Leclerc, Intervalle, Jean-Kenta Gauthier, PARIS-B, PGI, Poetic Scape, Stieglitz19, The Third Gallery Aya, TOBE Gallery, Paris Photo

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