The 23rd edition of the Paris Photo fair was held Nov. 7-10 at the city’s Grand Palais. The event is a unique occasion to see a staggering number of images from big names, as well as attend talks, the publishers section, signings and more.
The gallery booths showed work by Man Ray, Jim Goldberg, Dorothea Lange, Irving Penn, Robert Frank, Sebastiao Salgado, Ansel Adams, Alec Soth, Josef Koudelka, Juergen Teller, Sally Mann, William Klein, Bruce Gilden, to name a few.
A Europe-heavy affair, it was also perhaps notable for a lack of voices from the Arab world - and for the type of images from the region that were present.
Of this year’s 180 galleries, the fair reported, 3 percent were from the Middle East. That compares to 6 percent from Asia, 2 percent from Latin America and 2 percent from Africa, most being European and North American. The Daily Star counted one gallery from Morocco, three from Turkey, one from Iran and one from Israel.
Among the artists exhibited by Marrakech gallery 127 were French Moroccan photographer Carolle Benitah, whose work uses archive images covered with gold foil, and Flore, a French-Spanish artist whose work, while beautiful, at times verges on Orientalism.
Istanbul gallery Dirimart showcased a mixed bag of Turkish, Iranian and European artists, and presented Julian Rosefeldt’s “Deep Gold,” a trippy, surrealist, explicit and at times apocalyptic black-and-white short film, as part of the fair’s film program. Fellow Turkish galleries Galerist had a solo by the late Sahin Kaygun, and The Pill showed a mix of work. Tehran’s Silk Road Gallery included photos by Iranian film director Asghar Farhadi.
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In the publishers section, Lebanon’s Kaph Books was present for the second year, and was again the only Middle East publisher. Nada Ghosn, who was manning the Kaph stand, told The Daily Star at the close of the fair that “this year we had a better location, so lots of people were discovering the publishing house, [and] they are super happy to have a publishing house from the Middle East.”
She said Kaph had completely sold out of Fouad Elkoury’s tome “Passing Time.”
“He [Elkoury] was here by surprise, so we did like a ‘happening’ and he signed the last copies in the world,” she said. “We had to ship them, the last copies from Beirut.”
Several Lebanese photographers told The Daily Star they’d opted to stay in Beirut because of the uprising rather than go to Paris Photo.
Ayla Hibri, who had a book signing Saturday at the Kaph Books stand, said she felt conflicted about leaving Beirut at this time. “It feels very strange, actually. I really wanted to be here and I was very excited to come, but it just creates a bittersweet feeling to leave it behind. But you have to do your work.”
“Also I feel good,” she added, “like I’m representing Lebanon - the work is all shot in Lebanon as well, and it kind of represents all the frustrations that I felt in Lebanon, which everybody also felt, which is all in the book in a way, directly or indirectly.”
Looking for Arab or Middle Eastern work among the thousands of images at the gallery booths felt like searching for a needle in a photography haystack, with a few notable exceptions.
Paris gallery Eric Dupont featured France-based Palestinian artist Taysir Batniji’s work “GH0809,” a subversive series of images of Gaza houses destroyed by Israeli airstrikes in 2008-2009 during Operation Cast Lead, presented in a real-estate advertising format. New York’s Yossi Milo Gallery showcased work by Hassan Hajjaj, aka “the Andy Warhol of Marrakech.” His fun, vibrant images are also up at a retrospective at Paris’ Maison Europeenne de la Photographie.
The Daily Star spotted work by other regional photographers, including Iranian Fatemeh Baigmoradi at New York’s Laurence Miller Gallery and Egyptian artist Youssef Nabil at Paris’ Nathalie Obadia gallery.
Among the rest, representations of the Arab world and the broader region were perhaps too much from the “expected” categories - historic images that flirt with Orientalism, abandoned buildings, “conflict-documentary-turned-art.”
The Daily Star’s survey of the fair is not exhaustive, and is perhaps itself biased. Still, it is disappointing to see how representations of the Arab world are valued or traded at such an important international photography event.
Paris Photo had not replied to a request for comment on Arab representation at the fair by the time The Daily Star went to print.
Images of Lebanon occasionally popped up. Paris gallery Polka had Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s photo of Oscar Niemeyer’s experimental theater in Tripoli’s Rashid Karami International Fair. The pair traveled to Lebanon in October 2017 to photograph the site for Polka Magazine’s 40th issue, the gallery press material said. The 95-by-120 centimeter signed, dated and numbered print was selling for a cool 4,500 euros ($4,958) unframed, or 5,300 euros framed.
French photojournalist Yan Morvan had several vintage prints from the Lebanese Civil War as part of his solo at Paris’ Sit Down gallery booth. Unframed prints were also available for viewing and purchase. “Some [images] are irreproducible, the negative having been lost,” the Paris Photo press kit said of Morvan’s work. His framed “Hayat Khorbotli, 1985” image, for instance, was selling for 8,750 euros. Other framed images on display had similar prices.
Lebanon also featured briefly in a New York Times exhibition titled “Carbon’s Casualties,” with footage from the Cedars in Maaser al-Chouf.
And as part of a Huawei photos-on-smartphone promotion, Magnum photographer Bieke Depoorter showed uninspiring images from Lebanon, part of her otherwise striking “Agata” series.
Several booths showed historic images of Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria, including at London’s James Hyman, sometimes beside similar images from Europe.
Germany’s Ursula Schulz-Dornburg had black-and-white images shot in Palmyra in 2010 at Santa Monica’s Gallery Luisotti; Nantes’ Melanie Rio gallery showed images of a Sudanese archaeological site by France’s Philippe Chancel.
New York’s Bruce Silverstein Gallery showed an image by Dutch artist Marjan Teeuwen titled “Destroyed House Gaza 1, 2017.” Magnum photographer Larry Towell’s “Gaza City, Gaza,” 1993, in Toronto’s Stephen Bulger Gallery, showed children apparently brandishing handguns against a wall covered in Arabic graffiti tags. Galerie Julian Sander included Sean Hemmerle’s “Them (Iraq),” 2003/2018, from his series of portraits of Iraqis and Afghans.
Eric Baudelaire’s “The Dreadful Details,” 2006, an elaborate diptych mise-en-scene showing as part of work in the Juana de Aizpuru gallery in Madrid, drew quite a crowd. Assembled on a U.S. set, the tableau depicts an “Iraqi village” in conflict, with foreign soldiers, the press, a woman nursing a wounded or dead boy, a man gesturing at the camera with a soldier nearby, a veiled woman speaking to another soldier.
Referencing art history and questioning representations of the Arab world, Baudelaire’s provocative piece felt somewhat out of place and risked reinforcing the opposite concepts. (It was selling for 75,000 euros plus VAT.)
Spanish photographer Laia Abril, who has done work on abortion and femicide, had two large images showing at the entry to the Les filles du Calvaire gallery booth. From her “On Rape Culture” series, the images were of a burka and what appeared to be a wedding dress. The harrowing stories behind the images, from Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan respectively, were printed above the images. Such photos cannot but raise the question of the appropriateness of trading in disaster and despair at eye-watering prices.
They are not the only works that raise this dilemma. Polka was showing devastating images of human suffering by Salgado - “unseen vintages from his Serra Pelada Gold Mine series,” according to the press material. The contrast and contradiction between the prints’ sale at the fair and the poverty they were photographed to decry could scarcely have been more shocking.
As people were being ushered out Sunday evening, The Daily Star spotted “Liban,” by Morvan, the French photographer with the Civil War prints, in the publishers section. A woman had asked to look at it.
“Oh, it’s all of the Civil War,” she remarked as she flicked through the 460-plus-page volume, before flipping it shut. “I lived through it,” she said as she walked away, “I don’t want to look at it.”
Food for thought for those selling disaster photos with blue-chip fine art price tags.
This article has been adapted from its original source.
