Photography, fashion and surrealism meet at Paris Photo

Photography and fashion, fine art and luxury meet at Paris Photo this year, which opened to much anticipation in the Grand Palais on Wednesday.

A perfectly staged event ranging across portraiture, neo realism, war reportage, fantasy, erotica and, above all, surrealism, as this year marks the 100th anniversary of the movement that transformed art and photography.
 
Debuting in a somber mood, with most creatives openly gloomy about the election results in the United States, and a returning president whose vilification of the LGBTQi+ community has caused great alarm. Yet, there was also a palpable sense of artists, gallery owners and fans of photography retreating to the creative world in Paris, as the U.S. prepares for a highly uncertain future.

Featuring gilt-edged sponsors like Ruinart and BMW with their own dedicated prizes, Paris Photo also included lots of displays by luxury brands and publishing houses. Louis Vuitton managing to combine both elements with a large bookstore on the upper floor featuring its City Guides, from recent examples like Alasdair McLellan shooting the Highlands of Scotland to classics like Slim Aarons’ visions of the dolce vita on the Italian Riviera.
 
It was also instructive to note that this edition of Paris Photo featured four galleries from Budapest, the capital of Hungary, which has been ruled as an “illiberal democracy” by its authoritarian prime minister and Donald Trump friend Viktor Orban for over a decade.
 
“Now, the Americans will get to see what it’s like to live under this sort of regime,” commented Tomas Opitz, the Venezuelan-Hungarian director of Budapest gallery Tobe.
 
His gallery featured a trio of artists focused on dislocation and moving between several cultures in youth and life. Like Juan Brenner, a Guatemalan photographer who shot in his younger days for Vogue and L’Officiel in New York, whose work now focuses on a personal journey of recovering his origins. The results varied from portraits of steely youth to This Universe, a haunting analogue image printed in archival pigment ink of a goods train in a remote Scottish valley.

Upstairs, there was a brilliant personal display by Dorottya Vékony at Lontermhandstand, another Hungarian gallery, featuring cut-out semi-clad female figures in black and white almost floating within glass frames. A multi-disciplinary artist, she also showed a giant sculpture of life-sized photos of cut out human figures, their flesh all wrapped around each other, in a headless orgy. Surrealist erotica at its most disturbingly best.
 
In an age where autocrats exploit puritanism and attack alleged Western decadence to divide people, John Kayser’s remarkable array of nude images from 1960s LA packed real punch. While working for an aerospace company he shot a series of color nudes, made more transgressive by placing them beside incongruous objects – tea sets, wooden stools or fluffy toys.
 
Works by photographers best known for shooting fashion instead covering other disciplines, abounded: David LaChapelle’s vision of a shark eating a superb pair of legs in a bloodied New England sea; or Steven Klein’s dreamlike photo of naked model and racehorse swimming in the same pool. While works by Patrick Demarchelier ranged from a gelatin silver print of a noble lion’s head to naked Christy Turlington, arms akimbo, with a white mice on her shoulder. A perfect image for any modernist dining room, even if it was priced at $72,500.
 
Many works proudly noted their magazine origins: Arthur Elgort’s super vision of a young Kate Moss gently stroking an elephant’s trunk in Nepal confirmed it was for British Vogue. Others, however, hid theirs. Like In Camera gallery which neglected to state that Koto Bolofo’s brilliant black-and-white shoot of youth explosion and South African township dandies in 1997 was shot for Vogue Hommes International. I should know, since I was the editor-in-chief who commissioned the shoot.
 
Bolofo is also the subject of an exhibition in the Dover Street Market this week in the Marais, as Paris celebrates photography throughout the capital. While Galerie Dior recently began a homage to one of fashion’s all-time greatest lensmen Peter Lindbergh. Unlike Paris Photo, which ends Sunday evening, Lindbergh’s tribute runs until May 4 in Galerie Dior.
 

Among portraiture, Cologne’s Contemporary Art gallery boasted a brilliant array by Timm Rautert of artists like Gerhard Richter and Olafur Eliasson or filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. And one had to love Hiroshi Sugimoto’s giant self-portrait, standing close to a mysterious shot of Mount Fuji, printed on washi paper, normally used for origami. One could not help noting the juxtaposition of the election victory of the Republicans – the only leading conservative party in a major democracy that is led by climate change deniers – and this great image of Mount Fuji. Seeing as the highest mountain in Japan recently enjoyed its first snowfall after its longest period without snow since records began 130 years ago.
 
One did not need to be rich to acquire beautiful photos. A Louise Dahl-Wolfe shot of Coco Chanel in her Paris apartment was priced at $5,000; while Sid Avery’s snap of an innocent Audrey Hepburn on a bicycle carrying her dog Famous in Paramount Studios cost $11,000 – both at Staley Wise gallery. And, albeit tiny at just 12 X 8 centimeters, intriguing black and white images of New York in a snowstorm were priced between five or ten thousand euros. And shot by the photographers’ photographer, the great Saul Leiter.
 
Historical imagery were also available – from a marvelous shot of the Rialto in Venice from 1876, remarkably free at dawn of any human figures, shot by Carlo Naya in 1876. Or William Henry Fox Talbot’s 1860s image of Notre Dame, surrounded by earlier and now non-existent buildings.
 
Given the horrifying violence of the past few years, war photography was understandably well represented: Robert Capa’s reportage of an Israeli Government Forces ambulance under fire in 1948, the year their state was founded. As well as some scarily beautiful color photos of atomic bomb testing in Nevada in 1957, culled from U.S. Army archives. Or tough and compelling imagery by Gilles Caron of conflict – The Battle of the Bogside in 1969, or a Diamantino silver modern print of his legendary image of an Ibo combatant, bearing six rockets on his head, in the Biafra Civil War in Nigeria of  
 
Finally, this being Paris, there was lots of book signings; large stands with rare first edition books of photography – from Man Ray to Weegee – and loads of talks, in a section  entitled ‘Conversations’. With the hottest ticket to hear Jim Jarmusch, the famed indie filmmaker, who is the guest of honor for the whole event.