Paris Photo was one of the highlights of the year for me, although there is much about the actual event and its venue I dislike. For those who’ve not been, PP is mainly a trading show for dealers, with over 80 from around the world having stands and selling product. Its an expensive business, so many are looking for big money, largely selling corporate artworks to decorate extravagantly large office walls in major cities across the world. What matters most is scale and colour and the result is big prints that often achieve the difficult task of being both boring and garish.
If you went to PhotoLondon you will know exactly what I mean. Half of Paris Photo was like this, but there was also a truly incredible amount of really excellent photography on display, including on the stands of some of the better-known US dealers. My vote for the favourite of these has to go to Bruce Silverstein, where several photographers were treated to well-displayed mini-exhibitions of their work – with a pink-curtained area with images by Joel-Peter Witkin, and another black-painted wall with images by Aaron Siskind, as well as a nice range of works from Paris by one of my favourite photographers Andre Kertesz, along with one of the first images I wrote (and lectured) about, his Martinique, made when he was in his seventies in 1972. You can read someone else’s thoughts about it here.
Other galleries with plenty to see included Laurence Miller, Robert Klein and Howard Greenburg. Vu La Galerie had a fine range of images, mainly documentary and photojournalistic, but also including a couple of John Davies landscapes from the show currently at their Paris gallery.
Far too many stands to mention were – at least in part – showing interesting work, and from all periods of photography. Many years ago I picked up a number of copies of ‘Photograms of the Year‘ from the 1920s and 30s, and some of the more interesting images were nudes by the Czech photographer Frantisek Drtikol, and I came across work by him on half a dozen different stands including Kicken from Berlin and Michael Hoppen. Kicken also had some of the Austrian Heinrich Kuhn‘s large gum prints from around 1900, impressive for their size. Most of his work I had only previously seen as small reproductions.
There was also some fine work from the nineteenth century, with some of the finest images being on the stalls of English dealers, including for the first time Lindsey Stuart from Bernard Quaritch Ltd, who was showing on Baudoin Lebon stand, and Robert Hershkowitz.
One thing that was noticeable was that some galleries were showing exactly the same highly priced images as last year, perhaps an indication that these pictures were actually overpriced?
The market in photography has many pitfalls for the ignorant or inexperienced, and it always dismays me to find work that must make the photographers turn in their graves for sale. One stand had a couple of cyanotypes that I would have told my rawest student to put in the bin and have another try, and there were many ‘vintage prints’ that must surely have been taken out of the bins of the photographers concerned. It made me feel I should rush home and start looking through all those old boxes of my own ‘vintage’ prints in the loft and burn any which I don’t think reflect my best standards – probably most of the prints from my first 20 years in photography. In most cases they only got into those boxes because they weren’t quite good enough to show.
Of course the whole thing about ‘vintage’ prints is largely a nonsense. There were several opportunities in PP to compare prints of the same image on different stands made at different times. In virtually every case, the prints made later are better. And of course cheaper.