Paris Photo 2024’s standout displays
Paris Photo, the photography world’s “north star” event, has returned to mark its territory under the vaulted dome of the Grand Palais. It opens a new chapter in the fair’s history, boasting a revised layout, expanded sections, smart curatorial interventions and fresh visual branding. Amidst a growing emphasis on contemporary practice, not to mention multiple Surrealist nods to celebrate the art movement’s 100th birthday, works inspired by the land and city provide much contemplation. Here are five standout displays from the fair’s 27th edition – selected by 1000 Words Assistant Editor, Alessandro Merola.
Alessandro Merola | Fair highlights | 07 Nov 2024 | In association with MPB
1. Mark Ruwedel, Los Angeles: Landscapes of Four Ecologies
Large Glass Gallery
Orchestrating selections from Mark Ruwedel’s conceptually ambitious and ongoing four-part epic, this installation by Large Glass Gallery delivers an impactful meditation on the fraught relationship between the natural environment and economic expansion, the inevitable consequences of which are never far from view. Various vantage points onto Los Angeles are offered here – from its rivers and canyons to the desert and Western edge – revealing not only the places nature and humanity intersect, but where the artist encounters history. Although Ruwedel is very much committed to, and working through the lineage of, the American New Topographic aesthetic (Ed Ruscha’s gasoline stations and Lewis Baltz’s industrial parks are amongst the seminal works at this edition), his work is not derivative nor daunted by the past (even if it is haunted by it). Seizing in their austere, elemental beauty, these hand-printed pictures quietly draw you in, inviting you to find evidence of human traces on the landscape, whether through a discarded water bottle or old train track that hisses at you as the wind sweeps through its bended edges. There are the blazed trees of Burnt too, a small portfolio Ruwedel made in the aftermath of the 2022 fires. They are as much onlookers to the contesting of wildness as we are.
2. Ester Vonplon, I See Darkness
Galerie S.
The narratives contained within the land are also startlingly evoked in Ester Vonplon’s display with Galerie S., which offers one of the most unique viewing experiences in the reinvented Emergence section upstairs. It comprises new and eye-catching experiments from the series I See Darkness, for which the Swiss artist turned a disused tunnel, once the entrance to the Safien Valley in Switzerland, into a darkroom of sorts, utilising light-sensitive paper to transcribe the alchemical rhythms of darkness, nature and time. Developed across days, sometimes months, the resultant images bear an irresistible range of shapes, colours, textures and moods. Shown here in an appropriately black booth, separated by a 10-metre-long unique piece produced in the tunnel, they appear frail, fleeting yet also lucid, bearing a dreamy density and layering of elements which seems to embolden nature – a nature which Vonplon has indeed let back in. Thus commendable are the ways in which the artist has submitted herself to a collaborative and unpredictable practice that is deeply rooted in her relationship with her local environment. Vonplon sees through it, listens to it, learns from it. Vonplon reminds us to follow suit.
3. Sakiko Nomura, Träumerei
Galerie Écho 119
Galerie Écho 119’s representation of the Sakiko Nomura continues to impress at this small but special solo presentation. It marks the first time the Träumerei series has been exhibited in its entirety outside the Japanese artist’s native country, albeit with selected prints only viewable upon request. There is also the opportunity to experience a delectable portfolio of collotypes, rich in grayscale and deep in jet-black, printed by Benrido this summer. The allure of this work lies in the fact one can enter it at any point, and follow it in any direction, in turn attempting to thread together a loose story through Nomura’s spliced images of skylines, landscapes, flowers, animals and sitters in repose. The combinations tease out tensions between interiority and exteriority, nature and artifice, reality and illusion, yet simultaneously resist any clarity on where the lines are drawn. Nomura’s is a multifaceted world, lit by a pale moon, a dreamwork. No matter how close you get, these vestiges feel somehow distant, wrapped in thought, clouded in a state of reverie. They are the last witnesses of moments that would otherwise be lost forever; or never happened at all.
4. Antony Cairns, E-ink Screens
Intervalle
Making a star turn at Intervalle is Antony Cairns, who, too, probes the realm of (science) fiction. One must crane one’s neck to view the artist’s latest so called “e-ink” works, which are encased in individual Perspex boxes. Here, Cairns has hacked into, and uploaded images onto, e-readers, subsequently fixing ink – or, indeed, trapping time – on the screens. They record urban scenes – architecture, tunnels, signs et cetera – from cities including Shanghai, Tokyo, Los Angeles and London. Although the captions indicate where each image was taken, experienced as a whole, any distinctions between locales collapse under the grimy, gloomy glow of megapolis sky. They turn into the same cities, unknown cities and on-the-brink-of-becoming bygone cities. Whilst Cairns’ practice has a strong affinity with digital technology (he is also launching two limited-edition books at the fair, produced using a RISO machine and Sony’s discontinued Mavica camera, respectively), these images, with their etch-like aesthetic, seem to stretch even further back in time. One feels that the artist is almost stealing from the past to give to the future. There is, of course, something very cynical about his decision to encase the screens behind glass, like remnants, or fossils. Cairns asks: whose utopia now?
5. Denis Malartre, Les Objectales
Bigaignon
Despite the irony of viewing them in a commercial setting, given the ethos of France’s late 1960s Supports/Surfaces school which the late Denis Malartre riffed off, the clinical approaches of the late Parisian photographer make the Bigaignon booth – located in the dynamic Prismes section – a succinct, sensual statement on materiality. Borne out of ‘exasperation’, these 50 pared-down prints from the 1986–88 series Les Objectales, elegantly mounted in white-wooden frames, depict bits of paper affixed to the corners of a Parisian apartment, as well as strips hanging from the ceiling. The depth of field is shallow and the focus is minimal, bringing to attention the interplay and paradoxes of light and shadow – that is, the latter existing only in the presence of the former, yet defined by its complete absence. They are, simply and deconstructed, a set of formal orientations across surfaces, revealing not only the medium’s physicality and fabrication, but also, somehow, its aura. With these highly portable, repeatable image-objects implying infinite reiterations, we find Malartre’s fixation with photography above all else. ♦
Paris Photo runs at the Grand Palais until 10 November 2024.
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Alessandro Merola is Assistant Editor at 1000 Words.
Images:
1- Mark Ruwedel, “Sunken City” (2017), from Los Angeles: Landscapes of Four Ecologies. Courtesy Large Glass Gallery
2-Mark Ruwedel, “Big Tujunga Wash #15” (2018), from Los Angeles: Landscapes of Four Ecologies. Courtesy Large Glass Gallery
3>5-Ester Vonplon, “Untitled” (2024), from I See Darkness. Courtesy Galerie S.
6>7-Sakiko Nomura, “Untitled” (2017), from Träumerei. Courtesy Akio Nagasawa Gallery and Galerie Écho 119
8-Antony Cairns, “LDN4 #20” (2024), from E-ink Screens. Courtesy Intervalle
9-Antony Cairns, “TYO2, MAVICA #107” (2024), from MaViCa CTY (Mörel Books, 2024). Courtesy Mörel Books
10>11-Denis Malartre, “Untitled” (1988), from Les Objectales. Courtesy Bigaignon
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