As every fall, Paris Photo invites you to rethink your look. Every work, every exhibition project, and every book proposes an understanding of photography not as an object of consumption, but as a form of visual thought in constant transformation. True to this drive of renewal, the exhibition in its twenty-eighth session reaffirms its ability to successfully reinvent itself, opening a fertile ground in which sacred names mingle with new voices, confirming photography as a process in constant evolution, where the color of the past is integrated into dynamics that expand its languages and modes of representation.
At the entrance to the Grand Palais, the Bougie Gallery opens up a 36-metre-wide wall, where a selection of images taken over the past four decades by French photographer Sophie Ristelhuber – winner of the 2025 Hasselblad Prize – reveal the turmoil in our world. The artist deliberately avoids arranging chaos and disposing of images in a composition that intensifies the heritage and tensions of our time.
From past to future: photography as an open process
“Hackable for video, sculpture or performance“Photography is an open medium whose history revisits the exhibition at a time that anticipates its future,” warns Anna Planas, artistic director. Thus, the experimental spirit that permeates the works of pioneers of the medium on display at the Hans B. Kraus Gallery reverberates throughout the exhibition. Within the department Postfor the first time this year there Malagenia Isabel Hurley exhibition, with installation by Marisa Gonzalez. Series Thermovac (1975-77), Created using a thermal reproducer, it reveals the author’s early fascination with the relationship between technology and artistic creativity. It is a collaborative work in which he asked his partners in the art studio in Washington, who represented the pain of women tortured in Chilean prisons during the Pinochet era. “In 1971 I used the first color camera,” highlights the Vizcaena artist. “In Spain, at the Escuela de Bellas Artes where I had studied in the past. I was interested in the future: integrating photography, video and new generative systems. Photography was just a process within my work.”
At Frankel Gallery, additional sale Sleeves & Covers (nine 12″/No. 50) (2025), by Christian Marclay, from which the artist prints used record covers that, with their tears and wear, evoke the tactile memory of sound and the passage of time. At Pace Gallery, Richard Learoyd’s Marquette Flowers, captured in a room-sized darkroom that exposes photographic paper directly to the light, is transformed into a poetic meditation on human fragility. At Kroon Gallery, multidisciplinary Syrian artist Hoda Al-Takriti presents a sculpture created using textile impressions, while Stevenson and South African Guy Tillem interject his pigment impressions using acrylic paint, creating an evolution in his aesthetic exploration. Small in size, massive in mastery, are Jack Davison’s photographs at the Cobb Gallery.
Between reality and imagination
Tania Franco-Klein and Carlos Idun Tawiah approach, from different perspectives, the tension between reality and fantasy as a means of human exploration. In Rosegallery, the Mexican photographer interrogates the psychological stress of our time through carefully crafted scenes of intense color. “My projects are conceptual; self-portrait is practical, not about personal identity,” he warns. Idun-Tawiah transforms photographic archives into illuminating accounts of everyday life in Accra. “My inspiration came from the Senegalese cinema of the 1960s,” explains the rich auteur in the Galleria Alta pavilion, where his works are on display. “I try to give life to my subjects in the most natural way possible, allowing them to act freely within the scenes I have designed for them. In this way I maintain the truth of my memories through a fictional narrative.”
Universal sounds and familiar landscapes
The heart of the festival is occupied this year Voicesa vibrant sector that brings together for the first time galleries from Asia and Eastern Europe, among other countries, bringing new perspectives and geographies to the international arena. Hosted by Devika Singh Way Nadine Wittlesbach, He crosses around Landscape and family relationships. Among the most popular proposals stands out an unprecedented series by Justin Kurland, Presented by Higher Pictures, the American artist depicts the dead nature of his priest Collages Implemented from the series Nudes to Lee Friedlander: A reappropriating gesture that challenges masculine heritage and rewrites authorship from a subversive voice. In the art of Vadhihara, The village is on the highwayy, Indian photographer Gauri Gill has created an authentic architecture of resistance, honoring the invention and dignity of peasants who faced the liberalization of agriculture that undermined their fragile way of life.
In the digital sector, curated by Nina Rohrs, photography expands to include creating images that interrogate our present. Nagel Draxler Gallery Reflects Generational Approaches: Presents Martha Roessler In Public Place: The Airport SeriesIt is an ongoing project that looks at airports as transitional spaces where forms of exchange, work, behavior and control unfold. The work questions how capital, surveillance and control shape these environments; After 11-Q, texts were included reflecting increased fear and censorship during travel. Anna Riedler, on the other hand, approaches the image from a technological perspective, exploring medicine and measurement connected to the natural world, using data, especially self-generated, to create original narratives through digital media and tools such as automatic learning. “Together these exhibitions offer a reflection of our times,” warns Maja Funke, the gallery’s New Media Artistic Director, “from analogue photography documenting the public and the transition, to the younger generation being reflected in the public in public Internet images, demonstrating how much today’s technological tools influence the perception of reality.”
Located on the terrace of the Grand Palais, the Emergenti sector presents 20 individual projects, including works by Briton Lewis Porter in the Chiquita Room. The project addresses the distance between things, ideas and people through three distinct series. From scientific and educational materials found in libraries, archives and markets, they transform them into using photography and other various materials to reveal the paradox of separation in modernity. At Camara Oscura Gallery, Claudia Fugeti addresses climate change through color interventions that reflect the continuity of life and the tension between the natural and the artificial. The Spanish participation in the fair this year, formed by several galleries, is completed with ADN, Alarcón Criado, Gregory Leroy – Nuevo Impulso, Hama Gallery, Nordés, Rocío Santa Cruz and Sorondo Projects, as well as an editorial: RM.
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