Paris Photo 2026: Essential Exhibitions Beyond The Grand Palais
As Paris Photo takes over the city, the wider art scene comes into focus. From landmark museum exhibitions to boundary-pushing presentations, discover the shows worth planning your week around, and the spaces placing photography at the heart of the cultural conversation.
1000 Words | Resource | 11 November 2026
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Stan Douglas, Parallax – Jeu de Paume
20 October – 10 January 2027
At Jeu de Paume, Stan Douglas’ largest survey in Paris in over 30 years approaches history less as a sequence of recoverable events than as a repertoire of images, conventions and competing accounts. Across works such as Crowds and Riots (2008), Disco Angola (2012) and Penn Station (2021), photographs reconstruct scenes whose apparent documentary authority is complicated by their elaborate staging and composite construction. Elsewhere, film, video, and installation allow narratives to be repeated, displaced or viewed from incompatible positions. Across a practice extending from the late 1980s to the present, Douglas treats historical representation as a technical and political problem. What can be made visible depends on the means of representation, but also on the assumptions those means carry with them. Parallax names the discrepancy produced by a change in viewpoint; that discrepancy is a condition built into the images themselves, whose extraordinary precision makes their status as evidence all the more difficult to take for granted.
Susan Meiselas, Nicaragua, History, Memory – Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
21 October – 7 March 2027
Few photographs have travelled as far from their original moment as Susan Meiselas’ images of the Nicaraguan Revolution. Taken between June 1978 and July 1979, as the Sandinista uprising brought down Anastasio Somoza’s dictatorship, they entered newspapers, murals, matchboxes, and T-shirts, becoming emblems of a revolution whose meaning would itself change. The most famous of these, Molotov Man, acquired an afterlife that no single caption could contain. Meiselas returned to Nicaragua over the following four decades, tracking these reproductions and speaking with the people pictured, while attending to the distance between what a photograph records and what a society asks it to remember. Bringing together more than a hundred works, documents and film excerpts, the exhibition follows that gap as it widens, narrows and shifts with the political moment. The result is not simply a history of the revolution through photographs, but a history of what happened to those photographs once they ceased to belong to the photographer alone.
Irving Penn, Penn & Fashion – MEP
30 September – 17 January 2027
Irving Penn’s fashion photographs have a peculiar economy. Almost nothing in the frame is incidental, yet the clothes never quite submit to the image. A Balenciaga dress becomes an arrangement of planes; an Issey Miyake garment, a study in volume and movement; the extravagant gowns of John Galliano and Christian Lacroix, exercises in colour held under strict compositional control. Penn & Fashion traces six decades of work for Vogue, from the haute couture of Dior and Balenciaga to Chanel’s feathered headpieces and the sculptural forms that occupied Penn during his thirteen-year collaboration with Miyake. What changes is fashion; what persists is Penn’s appetite for form, texture and the expressive possibilities of the dressed body. The exhibition draws chiefly on the MEP and Nicola Erni collections, supplemented by loans from the Irving Penn Foundation and the Miyake Issey Foundation. Its real subject is the friction between two kinds of artifice, the designer’s invention and the photographer’s exacting reduction of it to light, surface and shape.
Justine Kurland & Mariah Robertson, Antiphoto – Galerie Miranda
4 September – 15 November
Justine Kurland and Mariah Robertson turn the medium’s conventions into raw material, cutting, painting over, copying, and reassembling images rather than preserving their authority intact. Kurland’s 99 Nudes on the Wall (2026) arranges ninety-nine collage elements in a wall-spanning composition that changes as individual pieces are sold; her Bad Hand works splice reproductions of Lee Friedlander’s nudes with paintings by her late father, bringing the canon of the male nude into contact with questions of inheritance and artistic authority. Robertson takes a different route. Her 50 vivid risographs draw on a decade-long, still-expanding visual project, loosening the photograph from the singular, precious object and returning it to the realm of copies, circulation and chanceBoth artists’ individual wall works are priced at €199, placing the question of a photograph’s value alongside its material and conceptual reinvention.
The Space Between Us – Le Bal
19 June – 3 January 2027
What does it mean to collect photographs of other people, and what happens when those images are brought together? In The Space Between Us, drawn from the collection of Michael and Jane Wilson, 120 prints spanning nearly a century offer different answers. At Le Bal, images by Dorothea Lange, Daidō Moriyama, Tomoko Sawada, and Shōji Ueda sit within a wider constellation of work dating from the 1920s to the present. Some encounters appear fleeting; others bear the marks of elaborate staging or collaboration. Perhaps less a history of photographic styles than a series of negotiations over how another person may be seen – and what, despite the camera’s apparent intimacy, remains beyond its reach – The Space Between Us brings photographs made decades and worlds apart into conversation. Seen together, they acquire unexpected affinities, each altering the terms on which the others are read.♦
-1000 Words
Images:
1-Stan Douglas, Hastings Park, 16 July 1955, 2008. From the series, Crowds and Riots © Stan Douglas. Courtesy the artist and Jeu de Paume.
2-Susan Meiselas, Muchachos await the counterattack by the National Guard, Matagalpa, Nicaragua, 1978 © Susan Meiselas and Magnum Photos. Courtesy Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation.
3-Irving Penn, Young Woman with Headdress, New York, 2005. Collection of The Irving Penn Foundation, New York © The Irving Penn Foundation.
4-Risograph, 2026 © Mariah Robertson. Courtesy Galerie Miranda.
5-Dorothea Lange, Sans titre [Main et chapeau de travailleur], 1938 © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor. Courtesy Wilson Centre for Photography and Le Bal.
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