The world's most important photography fair, Paris Photo, opened this year with a powerful statement about the medium's future amid mounting challenges from artificial intelligence and market pressures. The prestigious event, running through November 16 at Paris's historic Grand Palais, showcases nearly 180 galleries and over 40 book publishers, offering a comprehensive view of photography's evolution from war reportage to digital experimentation.
Upon entering the sunlight-flooded Grand Palais, visitors are immediately confronted by a monumental 36-meter-wide wall installation. Parisian gallery Jérôme Poggi has assembled over sixty photographs by Sophie Ristelhueber into this massive visual surface, displaying war-scarred people, wounded landscapes, and mysterious still lifes. For four weeks in autumn 1991, Ristelhueber flew by airplane and helicopter over Kuwait's desert to photograph traces of war that had raged there six months earlier.
The series, titled "Fait" - meaning both "done" and "fact" in French - comprises more than seventy images captured during the Gulf War. Some of these traces stand in the landscape like abstract sculptures, with the photographs making it difficult to distinguish whether viewers are seeing debris or architectural remains. As photographic subjects, they appear both banal and sublime simultaneously. In "Fait 68," viewers see a toppled, burst tank against fires and smoke plumes on the horizon - a factual document that simultaneously resembles a monumental but damaged SLR camera with its wide-angle lens broken from the bayonet mount.
Ristelhueber, born in Paris in 1949, received the Hasselblad Award for her life's work this year. Her retrospective at Paris Photo serves as an impressive homage to reportage photography and an appeal to defend photography as both a documentary medium and artistic amplifier of reality. The exhibition demonstrates photography's power to transform harsh realities into profound artistic statements while maintaining journalistic integrity.
Florence Bourgeois, who has directed Paris Photo for ten years, has encouraged the approximately 180 participating galleries to create solo exhibitions at their booths. This strategic decision transforms the fair from merely the world's most important commercial photography market into a more compelling temporary museum experience. The approach has proven particularly effective in highlighting underrepresented voices and forgotten masters.
One notable rediscovery is Marie-Laure de Decker, a French photojournalist (1947-2023) who long remained in the shadow of her male colleagues and is barely known in Germany. Paris galleries Anne-Laure Buffard and In Camera present a solo show of the Algeria-born photographer, whose many self-portraits reveal her career's early beginnings as a model. The soldiers she photographed in Chad in the mid-1970s were also posed before her camera, demonstrating her unique approach to documentary photography.
De Decker lived for several years with the Wodaabe, a Central African nomadic people, creating an intimate long-term portrait of this community. Her presentation at the fair represents one of the quietest but strongest showcases, revealing the depth possible when photographers invest time in understanding their subjects rather than capturing quick moments.
The Paris Photo actively drives forward a paradigm shift in gender representation: 39 percent of solo shows feature female photographers, while in the emerging artists section called "Emergence," the figure reaches 70 percent. One of the most exciting positions appears at Amsterdam's Homecoming Gallery booth: "Together, in One Breath" by American artist Mia Weiner, who photographs digitally but prints her pop-influenced images on a loom - a simultaneously old-fashioned and contemporary fusion of pixel and thread.
The main section features documentary photos by Sibylle Bergemann (Galerie Loock, Berlin), a conceptual installation by Martha Rosler (Nagel Draxler, Berlin/Cologne), albumin prints by photography pioneer Julia Margaret Cameron (Hans P. Kraus Jr., New York), and portraits by Erica Lennard (La Galerie Rouge, Paris). Between documentation, craftsmanship, and post-Art Déco aesthetics moves Raphaëlle Peria, who photographs landscapes from her childhood and subsequently scratches trees and shrubs with a stylus - creating relief-like, vulnerable, and unique works.
No other fair displays photography's stylistic and technical range so comprehensively. Historical positions prove particularly convincing, such as a series by Helen Levitt capturing chalk graffiti in New York between 1938 and 1940 (Zander Galerie, Cologne/Paris). Similarly compelling is the street photography of Fred Herzog, who settled in Vancouver, Canada, as a German emigrant in 1953. Herzog made his name as a street photographer but especially as a colorist, championing artistically scorned color photography through his darkroom work and legendary Kodachrome film material.
The dominance of art historically and photo-historically validated quality work and recent pieces by established photographers at many booths, while riskier positions require more searching, likely reflects current economic conditions. The global art market shrank by 12 percent in 2024, and photography was not spared. "2025 was a difficult year for many galleries, including the major ones," Bourgeois explains in conversation. Frugality has become the order of the day, understandable given global crises.
Since Brexit and the pandemic, Paris has experienced a renaissance as an art metropolis, and with it, the photography scene. Private, well-funded foundations like Fondation Louis Vuitton, the Pinault Collection in the Bourse de Commerce, and the spectacularly reopened Fondation Cartier are leaving their mark on the terrain. "It's an ecosystem," Bourgeois says diplomatically, acknowledging the complex interplay of commercial and cultural forces shaping contemporary photography.
When asked about the market's greatest challenge, she responds without hesitation: "Not losing its soul." Artists and gallery owners must work more closely together, pursuing projects that make sense beyond mere commercial viability. The Poggi Gallery's project of placing Sophie Ristelhueber's touching work at the center exemplifies this goal. The photograph of the overturned tank resembling a wrecked camera suddenly becomes a symbolic image for photography itself.
The medium faces its greatest test with artificial intelligence. Generative image creation threatens copyright and authenticity while opening new artistic paths. However, this theme plays only a minor role at the fair, though the somewhat conservatively named "Digital" section will likely be unable to avoid AI in coming years. Computer kitsch like Julieta Tarraubella's monitors bound into flower bouquets (Rolf Art, Buenos Aires - Tomas Redrado Art, Miami) can certainly be dispensed with.
More positively, Norman Harman stands out with a solo show at L'Avant Galerie Vossen (Paris). Each of his images begins with datasets from photo archives and AI systems, with his designs involving both personal handwriting and algorithms. The final products show analog-painted surfaces alongside digital brush structures - his work is as fluid and hybrid as his working method.
How radically AI changes visual ethics is demonstrated by a quiet shock moment in another booth (Heft Gallery, New York). Visitors are magnetically drawn to a photograph of a girl with piercing gray-green eyes - Steve McCurry's iconic "Afghan Girl" that graced National Geographic's cover in June 1985 and became known as the world's most famous photograph. However, this time Sharbat Gula, who had fled to Pakistan, no longer looks into the camera lens. In artist Ganbrood's work "The Second Gaze," she looks to the side - made possible by AI. It remains a stirring gaze that now tells us more about our present than about war.
The fair's comprehensive scope demonstrates photography's enduring vitality while highlighting the challenges facing the medium in an era of technological transformation and market uncertainty. From historical masters to contemporary innovators, Paris Photo 2025 presents photography at a crossroads, where traditional values of authenticity and artistic vision must navigate an increasingly complex digital landscape.
