Discoveries Old and New at Paris Photo 2025, Part 2 of 5

Our second group of photography discoveries from Paris Photo 2025 can be found in the slideshow below. For more context on the general idea of “discoveries” and information on the structure of these slideshows, head back to Part 1 (here).

Ungallery (here): The crisp geometries of anonymous Brutalist stairways are the starting point for this 2025 grid of images by the Argentinian photographer Jorge Miño. From there, he prints the high contrast black-and-white images on silk, and then rephotographs them with a twist of motion, creating windy curves and fluttering distortions. The resulting works elegantly mix hard and soft, upending in-between concrete spaces with unexpected fluidity and gentleness. Priced at €18000 for the set of 30 prints.

Jecza Gallery (here): The Romanian photographer Stefan Bertalan was interested in visualizing the underlying mechanisms of nature with his art, as seen in this vintage image of cornflowers from 1977. The arrangement is measured with obscure markings, notations, and interventions, seeing experimental patterns and geometries in its structure. Priced at €6500.

Ron Mandos (here): Gilleam Trapenberg was born in Curaçao and now lives in the Netherlands, and his photographic practice is rooted in the rhythms of his Caribbean birthplace. Here he points his camera at the blazing tropical sun, inverting the tonalities to create otherworldly orbs shining in the sky. Each dark sun feels like an afterimage seared on a retina, or a haunted memory distorted by time. Priced at €1750 each, and likely best in a grid of multiple prints.

Isabel Hurley (here): The performative female faces in these works by the Spanish artist Marisa González reference violence against women, particularly as perpetrated by Pinochet in Chile in the 1970s. She then processed her black-and-white images through a series of steps – photocopying the works via a thermofax machine onto high contrast acetate, which she then scraped and distressed in various ways by hand. Her results are alternately anguished, fearful and traumatic, filled with silent screams and protective gestures. In sets of three, priced at €5700.

Annie Gentils (here): Marc De Blieck’s photographs of the forest in the Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe, in Kassel, Germany, seem to search for systematization. Now a UNESCO heritage site, the landscape has been carefully designed and managed since the beginning of the 18th century, and the Belgian photographer’s images allude to this rigor, with carefully placed folds and images, and photographs always taken with the sun in the back. The dappled works are subtle and understated, but the iterative physical layouts gave the pictures a richer structural context. Priced at €4800 each.

UP (here): This 2015 waterpark image by Ronghui Chen captures life in the outskirts of modern Shanghai, particularly as lived by migrants from the countryside. Using scale and bright color to tell a deadpan story of crowded leisure, Chen connects to a long line of photographers from Massimo Vitali to Martin Parr. Priced at €5600.

Persiehl & Heine (here): Leveraging an 1860s era herbarium documenting algae specimens from Brittany, the German photographer Steffen Diemer has reimagined the plants in wet plate collodion. Here three strips divide the image, capturing its delicacy in warmly mottled tones. These works are straightforward in conception, but rich in expressive nuance. Priced at €8000.

Zen Foto Gallery (here): This expressively squiggled work by Hideka Tonomura was made on a recent trip to Seoul, where she attempted to unpack some ancestral family history mixed between Korea and Japan. Two sandwiched negatives blend the movement of what looks like a dance with the electric lines of jittery light, creating an energetic feeling of swirling time and motion. Priced at €1500.

Carole Kvasnevski (here): Mina Boromand’s diasporic journey has taken her from her homeland in Iran all the way to London, with additional stops along the way. One of those intermediate locations was Afghanistan, which forms the inspiration for this collaged/rephotographed work. Strands of yarn create falling lines of connection while an archival portrait is cut away, peeling back memories of past identity. Priced at €2200.

Bruno Tartarin (here): This 1969 abstraction by Swazay Tsawdanoualou spins with optical precision, with lines radiating and interfering in curved arcs. The implied motion pulls us inward toward the center, revolving down into tighter and tighter space. Priced at €2500.

Bruno Tartarin (here): Some kind of pleating seems to sit above (or perhaps below) the shadowy objects in this 1987 abstraction by the Czech photographer Tom Drahos. That mystery gives the composition some of its pull, the spatial ambiguities never quite resolving themselves. Priced at €8000.

ADMIRA (here): Charlotte Perriand was likely best known for her work as a furniture designer, particularly in Le Corbusier’s studio in the 1920s and 1930s, but she was also an accomplished photographer, as seen in this 1930s alpine scene. Vintage ski photography often has an atmosphere of romantic adventure, and these silhouetted figures set against a backdrop of rugged peaks certainly deliver a sense of old school Modernist vigor. Priced at €6000.

ADMIRA (here): Sante Vittorio Malli’s 1956 image of men heading out to shovel snow mixes neorealist humanity with a high contrast Modernist eye. The title “When Snow Means Bread” offers a clear social backdrop to the labor, but the composition makes the most of the dark silhouettes and the interplay between the angled shovel handles and the light poles. Priced at €2000.

ADMIRA (here): Ugo Zovetti was another Italian photographer steeped in neorealist aesthetics, and this vintage image of a 1960s trade fair in Milan bustles with post-war industrial energy. The blurred figure in front gives all the arrayed machinery a human touch, as though looking at what the future will soon bring. Priced at €4500.

POLKA (here): Eloïse Labarbe-Lafon’s project “American Album” follows in a long line of foreign photographers coming to America and being seduced by the mythologies of the Western road trip. The young French photographer’s approach blends small town motel and diner aesthetics with saturated overpainting, crafting a cinematic world with echoes of “Paris, Texas”. Priced at €3000.

Alta (here): This booth was a solo presentation of the work of the Ghanaian photographer Carlos Idun-Tawiah. While there were images from three separate bodies of work on view, including stylishly staged compositions of family gatherings and groups of boys, his re-enacted memories of black fathers and sons were the most consistently engaging. Many of the pictures seemed to search for resonant moments of nostalgic connection, like the tenderness of this father and son sleeping on the train. Based on the sampler of work presented, he feels like a young photographer on the rise. Priced at €10000.

ºCLAIRbyKahn (here): The idea of using wet plate collodion technology (and the associated mobile darkroom) to photograph a war zone is a decidedly 19th century concept. But that’s exactly what Edward Karpov has done in his recent images taken in the very contemporary war in Ukraine. This image contrasts two boys and their bicycles with a bombed building in the background, the moody blurring and chemical washes giving the moment an even more haunted and desolate feel. Priced at €4500.

Galeri Nev (here): Yildiz Moran was a Turkish photographer who studied in the UK in the early 1950s and then returned to Turkey to make images for roughly the next decade, before turning her attention to lexicography and translation and essentially leaving the medium behind. Since her death in 1995, her sons have rekindled interest in her work, as seen in this solo presentation. Many of her strongest images focus on the daily rhythms of Anatolian life, like this confident young man with money in his mouth; it’s a picture with the contagious swagger of a beaming smile, and the blurred motion of youthful vitality. Priced at €2300.

Spot (here): This plant specimen image by the French photographer Anaïs Tondeur is a “phytograph”. Apparently certain ruderal plants living in toxic soils produce an excess of a molecule called phenol, which when placed in contact with light sensitive paper, changes the chemistry enough to produce the unusual colors found here. Conceptually, these plant images point to a healing process, where ecosystems adapt and ultimately attempt to repair polluted soils; aesthetically, the oranges, browns, coppers, and bronzes feel charred and fragile but somehow still living. Priced at €900.

Caroline O’Breen (here): This three panel work by the Dutch artist Jaya Pelupessy almost requires a squint of the eyes to reveals its subject (a Muybridge-like galloping horse). Mixing photosensitive emulsions and silkscreened layers, and printed on metal silkscreen frames, the image dissolves into grainy color-separated abstraction, alluding to but updating a Pictorialist aesthetic. Priced at €17000.

In Camera (here): An aspirational fascination with the globe-trotting modernity of airplanes pervades Koto Bolofo’s images from the early 2000s. Born in Lesotho and raised in the UK, Bolofo is likely best known in the world of fashion photography, and his polished commercial aesthetic mixes playfully with makeshift airplanes in these images. Here a dark silhouette is held aloft by the two stylish men, gently helping it to create the imposing appearance of flight. Priced at €2900.

Part 3 of this Paris Photo summary report can be found here.

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Read more about: Anaïs Tondeur, Carlos Idun-Tawiah, Charlotte Perriand, Edward Kaprov, Eloïse Labarbe-Lafon, Gilleam Trapenberg, Hideka Tonomura, Jaya Pelupessy, Jorge Miño, Koto Bolofo, Marc De Blieck, Marisa González, Mina Boromand, Ronghui Chen, Sante Vittorio Malli, Stefan Bertalan, Steffen Diemer, Swazay Tsawdanoualou, Tom Drahos, Ugo Zovetti, Yildiz Moran, Admira Photography, Alta, Annie Gentils Gallery, Galeri Nev, Galería Isabel Hurley, Galerie Bruno Tartarin, Galerie Carole Kvasnevski, Galerie Caroline O'Breen, Galerie Persiehl & Heine, Galerie Ron Mandos, In Camera Galerie, Jecza Gallery, ºCLAIRbyKahn, Polka Galerie, Spot Home Gallery, Ungallery, UP Gallery, Zen Foto Gallery, Paris Photo

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