Paris Photo 2021: panorama of photographic creation in eight images – franceinfo

Paris Photo, a major meeting place for the photography market, is back this year after the cancellation of the 2020 edition. From November 11 to 14, 149 galleries are represented at the Grand Palais Éphémère on the Champs de Mars in Paris. From major galleries to emerging ones, the fair is an opportunity to discover or re-discover all the styles and eras of this medium, one of the favorites of the French. From film to digital, from documentary or conceptual photos, to see them in all colors or in black and white. Here is our subjective choice of eight works by eight different artists not to be missed.

Cy Twombly, a painter and photographer

The star of the photo fair is a painter. Known for his paintings influenced by literature and the gesture of writing, artist Cy Twombly photographed throughout his life.

Whether it’s the peaceful landscapes of his birthplace in Lexington, Virginia, roses with delicate petals, or slightly rotten lemons, there is a sweetness, an intimacy in these images. These blurry focus borders on melancholy. The photographs of Cy Twombly are presented by the Gagosian Gallery.

Pilar Albarracin shakes up the codes of Spanish macho

The “ELLES X” route puts women artists first. Always a necessity when we know that only 32% of the artists present are women. Pilar Alabarracin, at Georges-Phillipe and Nathalie Vallois, therefore obviously had its place in this course. She lives and works in Seville and Madrid. For 30 years, she has embodied and exploded in her images the stereotypes of the Spanish woman. By diverting and parodying, she denounces with false levity. Militant and cliché diversion, performer and joyful, her images flash like memories of a Movida of yesteryear.

Outsider art at Tomasz Machcinski

A touch of madness and an extraordinary story at Christian Berst : Tomasz Machcinski since 1966, long before Cindy Sherman, has drawn the portrait 22,000 times in 22,000 different characters. Alternately, orphan, homeless, worker and artist, this hunchbacked Pole after a nasty tuberculosis, created these roles as in the theater, then fixed them on film.

In the days of Communist Poland, it was black and white film. Today, it is digital in color. An anthology of historical figures, anonymous or transvestites. And as he says himself: “so I make my dreams come true”, raw photography like art.

Elsa and Johanna, a road movie for two

They also photograph themselves and slip into the skin of their characters. But with Elsa and Johanna, two young French artists barely in their thirties, it is the aesthetics of cinema and series that dominate.

For Find the truth at the house of La Forest Divonne, they settled in Calgary in Canada and built this photo novel, this road movie. Simon Baker, director of the European House of Photography, relates them as follows: “They are in a way more Actors Studio-style actresses, and we can easily imagine them (…) keeping their characters’ clothes after the photoshoot, wearing them when they get home, in the car, spending their evenings and their free time in the shoes of their characters and maybe even live in the settings they use.“

The earth is collapsing and Julien Guinand photographs it

Few galleries tell about climate change and its effects. The market is cautious, we can imagine the lack of desire to expose at home the terrible face of the world that awaits us. The gallery Francoise Besson has this courage by showing the remarkable work of Julien Guinand.

The photographer from the world of plastic arts and letters captured during three stays gigantic works in Japan following landslides. To save villages or homes in these endangered areas, following deforestation or mining, man tries to use plasters to avoid the worst. These remedies on the land are like “concrete dressings covering the mountains”, writes the photographer. With the images of Julien Guinand, the suffering earth looks like a sick body, where the trace of care becomes an illusory scar.

A photograph by Luc Delahaye is a painting

Between 1980 and 2000, photojournalist member of the Sipa and Magnum agencies, Luc Delahaye covered conflict zones. At the dawn of the new millennium, sour work changes angle and point of view. And on the stand of Nathalie Obadia, how not to be amazed by this full-length portrait of a farmer on dry land. It’s frontal: the gesture, the allure, the real without artifice, the visitor is immediately grabbed by the character.

On the occasion of his exhibition where this series was exhibited, a year ago, Luc Delahaye explained on France Culture his work in this African village: “I believe that with these photographs, more than with those I was able to take in the past, I tried to go beyond objective, apparent, material reality, and I was pulled, a little in spite of myself, but with my consent, to another dimension, perhaps a little more spiritual “. A documentary photograph, but which flirts with the pictorial and the spiritual, with the universal.

Finding Yulia Timoshenko

In the “Curiosa” section, a sort of cabinet of curiosities, as its name suggests, here is a funny, absurd and political series: Timoshenko’s escape, presented by the Alexandra de Viveiros gallery. Ukrainian politician Timoshenko and her braided crown hairstyle was one of the symbols of the Orange Revolution.

His image had become a symbol. When she becomes a political prisoner in her country, the two artists stage her escape, imagining a chase in the streets of her city. Or how photography rebels and mocks totalitarian powers.

Committed, activist: the photography of South African Sue Williamson

Political commitment too, through the photographic work of Sue Williamson, at Dominique Fiat. She is now 80 years old, and she is one of the most important South African artists. Native of the United Kingdom, her family left for South Africa in 1948. In 2020, she recounted her childhood in Telerama: “We arrived in June 1948, says the artist. I was 7 years old. In November of the same year, the elections gave victory to the nationalists and marked the beginning of the establishment of apartheid “. In the 1970s, this white photographer joined the fight against Apartheid. She documents segregation and even today she explores the discrimination that continues to haunt her country, with new migrants arriving from other African counties.

“Paris Photo” at the Grand Palais Ephémère from November 11 to 14 at the Grand Palais Ephémère. A virtual tour of the fair is visible on the Online Viewing Room by Paris Photo.