For four days, Paris Photo 99 will bring to the Carrousel du Louvre more than 75 exhibitors from 15 countries. This hot mix includes leading galleries in the U.S., Sweden, Japan, Hungary and Australia, as well as France, of course, from venues well-known for their commitment to photography since the 1970s to galleries that support both painting and photography.
Spanning straight photography to painterly photos, rare 19th-century proofs to the most recent cutting-edge practice, here in this "virtual stroll" we offer a sneak preview of Paris Photo 99, the only fair in Europe dedicated to art photography, a show teeming with discoveries and yet designed to retain a human scale.
For the third consecutive year, the North American galleries with the biggest impact on the global market will assemble at Paris Photo.
Edwynn Houk, Robert Miller, Howard Greenberg, Jane Corkin, Michael Senft, Howard Schickler, Joshua Mann Pailet (A Gallery for Fine Photography)–the most outstanding dealers from the U.S. and Canada continue to take part in Paris Photo, joined this year by the Zabriskie, Kathleen Ewing and Laurence Miller galleries.
Howard Schickler (New York) is one of the rare galleries to specialize in astronomy and space photography. Along with a handsome ensemble of European post-World War One avant-garde artists (Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Yevgeni Khaldei, Moholy-Nagy and Max Alpert), the gallery will also display iconic images of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space missions (1961-1973). An original print (20 x 25 cm) shows the scene exactly 30 years ago as Neil Armstrong first walked on the surface of the moon, a giant step for mankind and an important moment in the history of photography as well.
Taking "Women" as its theme, the Kathleen Ewing gallery (New York) has chosen to organize a vast show of 19th-, 20th- and contemporary photos centred on the elegance and power of what was once called the second sex. Opposite this group in the gallery's space: vintage prints of classic works by A. Aubrey Bodine, Esther Bubley, John Dugdale, Carl Austin Hyatt, Willy Ronis, Dana Salvo, August Sander, Eileen Toumanoff and Claudio Vazquez, among others.
Helen Levitt, born in 1913, has been scanning the poetry of urban life since the 1930s. The Laurence Miller gallery (New York) chose to pair her images of Manhattan street children with a selection of landscapes. Jerry Uelsmann's visions, created by using six to eight different negatives, are reminiscent of Magritte (Floating Nude, Sky Box, Sky Ceiling). Louis Conner's platinum prints are remarkable for their precise pictorial rendering of eternal China. Virginia Beahan and Laura McPhee give their reading of Iceland as an endangered paradise (The Blue Lagoon, 1988).
Across from André Kertész' "Distortions" and Sally Moon's fashion shots, the Jane Corkin gallery (Toronto) will hang work by a promising Canadian artist, Lori Newdick (1968). The French feminist Hélène Cixous once wrote, "Woman must write herself"; Newdick takes this very literally. In a recent suite of work entitled "Heroine", she explores the problematics of women's identity and the bigotry against lesbians and all women who go against the dominant model. Each of these three-part pieces is comprised of a 1950s-style book cover (Queer Affair, We Walk Through Lesbos' Groves), the icon of a man's tie and a black and white self-portrait.
Sally Mann, Lynn Davis, Abelardo Morell, Tina Barney, Cindy Sherman, Richard Misrach, Robert ParkeHarrison, Bill Jacobson and Vik Muniz are some of the photographers picked by the Edwynn Houk gallery for their exceptional show "Contemporary America", clearly the most significant exhibition of its kind to take place in Europe in recent years. Jacobson, who revealed a certain spiritual affiliation with Walt Whitman with his illustrations of the bard's poetry, here meditates on the impermanence of the universe, while Misrach, celebrated for his photographic exploration of the American desert for the last 20 years, tenders his recent views of the Golden Gate Bridge. Davis shares a very personal Africa. Mann's recent landscapes peer into the dark heart of places in Mississippi and Louisiana haunted by their past.
Edwynn Houk is giving special prominence to Vik Muniz, a founding member of Blind Spot and one of the youngest photographers to have had their work hung in New York's MoMA and Metropolitan. His subversive work brilliantly transgresses the accepted principles of photography. The gallery will present previously unshown works from the "Pictures of Chocolate" series, a preview of the upcoming Muniz retrospective to be held at Paris' Centre National de la Photographie from November 24, 1999.
Hungary, Japan, Holland, Spain, Australia, just to name a few–once again in 1999Paris Photo proves to be a rich concentration of the broadest international selection.
Picture Photo Space is one of Japan's leading photography specialists. This year its director, Masato Aino, has decided to compare and contrast the black and white portraiture of Takashi Nakagawa (the "Boy" series, 1991-1999) with that of Hiroshi Osaka (the "Venus" series, 1991-1999). Osaka's contemporary Venus (or perhaps his Ophelia) is none other than his wife, seen here in large-format black and white Polaroids. Aino is also showing the rigorous compositions of Shoji Ueda (the "Illusion" series, 1987-1995). Ueda's signature elements–an almost graphic composition achieved through the use of accessories (feather, hat, flower, etc.), the absence of any spatial reference points, and the intensity of his contrasts and colours– produce a magical effect that has rubbed off on his name as well.
Located in Prague since 1996, the Vintage gallery highlights modern and contemporary Hungarian photography. For its first time out at Paris Photo, the gallery will devote its stand to a thematic presentation, "Photography and Hungarian Modernism, 1919-1939", comprised of vintage prints by Imre Kinszki, Kardy Escher, Marta Aczél, Klara Langer, Istvan Kerny and Denes Rohai. For its part, the Byron Mapp gallery (Sydney), the premier Oz venue for camera work, proffers David Moore, Philip Quirk, Henry Talbot, Lewis Morley and Jeff Carter, a list that includes both the continent's most influential figures and some of its most promising emerging artists. Stockholm's Zinc gallery presents a fresh approach in contemporary Scandinavian photography, the enormous monochromes of Jan Hietala (Sweden) and Ola Kolehmainen (Finland), along with international artists such as Jean-Marc Spaans, Helen Sear, Bill Jacobson and Shimon Attie.
Dutch photography occupies the place of honour at Van Zoetendaal Collections (Amsterdam) and at the Flatland (Utrecht) and Pennings (Eindhoven) galleries. Each will present a highly diversified array of contemporary artists from Holland. For instance, Gerco de Ruijter (Flatland gallery) does aerial landscape shots by attaching his camera to a kite. Seen from above, with no horizon or perspective, the earth is reduced to geometrical forms resembling an abstract painting, a visual impression further heightened by the extremely small size of these prints (15 x 15 cm). Harry Pennings is showing work by Tom Huibers and Phoebe Maas, while Willem Van Zoetendaal, director of the photography department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, presents the portraits of Celine van Balen, who just had a important solo show at the Rijksmuseum.
For its first turn at Paris Photo, the Kowasa gallery from Madrid will offer a sampler of Spanish photography. The British-born Charles Clifford, who was Isabel II's favourite photographer, is considered one of the greatest exponents of the art in 19th century Iberia (Spanish Voyage, 1858). His architectural images will be seen next to those of Marti Llorens, the 1991 winner of the European Photography Award (Berlin), exploring the transformation of the urban built environment, in particular that of Barcelona. Also on exhibit is work by Pere Catala Pic and Emili Godés, master advertising photographers since the 1930s; Agusti Centelles, who bore witness to the Spanish Civil War (Bram Concentration Camp, 1939). As for contemporary work, Kowasa is exhibiting artists it represents–Ramon David, Ana Malagrida, Eduardo Cortils and Rafael Navarro, who with Joan Fontcuberta founded the Barcelona group Alabern in 1977.
Since 1970 in Seville and in Madrid starting in 1983, the Juana de Aizpuru gallery has been a strong exponent of international artistic trends, including photography, which it helped pioneer in Spain. Along with work by Rafael Agrenado and Federico Guzman, Juana de Aizpuru will show the black and white portraits of Alberto Garcia Alix (the 1989 and 1994 series), and Andres Serrano (Klansman, 1994; Head and The Mime, from his 1996 series "A History of Sex"). A critical vision of the world of fashion is afforded by the hyperrealist portraits of Ana Laura Alaez, France's Pierre Gonnord (the "Studio" and "Interiors" series, 1999) and Rogelio Lopez Cuenca, who combines photography with oil painting (Kerastase, 1994; Furs and Overcoats, 1991-95).
The Diferença gallery has played an essential role in the Portuguese cultural scene since 1977. This year at Paris Photo the gallery will present a dozen photographers from that country, most of whom work in black and white. Clara Azevedo, who made her mark with her photos of the Portuguese community in New England, will show a project done with Lucia Vasconcelos on thermal baths in Portugal, from ancient vestiges to those in use today. Other artists concerned with traces of the past are Anibal Lemos, with his shots of abandoned clothing, and José Paulo Ferro, whose photos of dead animals speak eloquently of the end of life. Some of the work to be displayed here has appeared in published form, such as Renato Roque's Renato in Littlespotland, a novel with photos, 1997, and the work of Fernando Curado Matos, assistant to the director Ernesto de Sousa and founding member of the Iris group (Faces of Stone, Margin of Absence).
Paris Photo is a matchless occasion to discover rare and previously unshown works,old and often unique prints, and the recent productionof contemporary photographers.
Two Paris specialist galleries will feature early photography. In its space, Hypnos recalls Eugène Atget (Portrait, 1900), Désiré Charnay (Mitla: Inside the Priest's Home, 1859) and Gustave Le Gray (Panorama and The Camp at Châlons, 1857), while the stand of A l'Image du Grenier sur l'Eau will show the statuary of the Parthenon as seen by Adolphe Braun in the 1860s. Braun set out to create an archive of photos of Europe's most important public and private collections (the Louvre, the British Museum, the Uffici in Florence, the Vatican museum, etc.). In addition to their artistic interest, these pieces also serve as "evidence" in the controversy over the ownership of the Elgin Marbles whose return from England Greece has sought since 1982.
A specialist in 19th and 20th century vintage photos, the Swiss gallery Zur Stockeregg will take advantage of Paris Photo to celebrate its 20th birthday. For this occasion, Claudia Coellen and Kaspar Fleischmann are devoting their space to the presentation of 44 photographic masterpieces from 1900 to 1950, assembled under the pellucid title "Essence". St-Cloud by Eugène Atget (1922), Dorothea Lange's San Francisco Waterfront (1934), Child's Grave by Walker Evans (1936) and Robert Frank's Long Island (1954)–each of these vintage prints is a masterpiece selected from the œuvre of one of the world's greatest photographers and a particular expression of the art of photography in its highest form. The eponymous book Essence covering this exhibition will be available at the stand during Paris Photo.
The collection of previously unshown photos from Spain the Csaba Morocz gallery (Paris) brought to last year's Paris Photo was a big success. This year the French dealer is concentrating on Central Europe in the 1930s, with original prints of work by André Kertész, Brassaï and Martin Munkacsi, and political photomontages done during the Weimar Republic by Alex Keil, who was close to John Heartfield. For the galerie 1900-2000 (Paris), David and Marcel Fleiss will show a selection from their extensive stock of Surrealist photos from the 1920s-'40s, including work by Man Ray, Claude Cahun and Dora Maar, along with pieces by Lionel Bayoul-Themines, Denise Bellon, Leo Dohmen, Raoul Ubac, Paul Wolff, Germaine Krull and Pierre Molinier. By Annie Leibovitz, a suite of silver prints, some of them bearing personal messages: John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Portrait of Helmut Newton and Portrait of Mick Jagger (1980).
Photographic Art Consulting (Cologne) is the exclusive representative for work by Gustav Klucis, El Lissitzky and Heinz Hajek-Halke. The gallery's director, Priska Pasquer, decided to show vintage photomontages by these three artists who were all notable for their taste for the experimental. Klucis (1896-1944) and Lissitzky (1890-1941) were two of the most outstanding figures of Soviet Constructivism. The gallery will present two truly exceptional photos, Klucis' Dynamic City (1919), thought to be the first photocollage done in the USSR, and Lissitzky's Constructor (photomontage and photocollage, ca. 1924), one of the most complex images in modern photography.
The Paris gallerists Agathe Gaillard and Françoise and Alain Paviot, photography specialists since the 1970s, will be showing a panoply of some of their favourite artists. Thus, at the Agathe Gaillard stand, photos by thirty-somethings Alejandra Figueroa from Mexico and Jérôme Soret from France will hang alongside those of old masters Henri Cartier-Bresson (Alicante, Seville, Madrid, 1935), Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Marc Ribout, Toni Catany, Edouard Boubat (who died recently), Harold Edgerton (inventor of the stroboscope and pioneer in ultra-small scale photography) and the fashion photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe. Françoise and Alain Paviot will provide a sweeping view of the history of photography organized around work by 25 artists, among them Harry Calahan, Robert Doisneau, Edward Guigley, André Kertész, Charles Nègre, Maurice Tabard, Wols and René Zuber.
For its first time at Paris Photo, the Belgian gallery Xavier Hufkens (Brussels) will present a recent, extensive series by Bruce Weber, the first Polaroids this American photographer has ever done, as well as work by Adam Fuss (colour film frames), Didier Vermeiren, James Welling and Stephen Wilks. Weber directs music videos (Chris Isaak, The Pet Shop Boys) and advertising footage for some of fashion's biggest brands (Jil Sander, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Gianni Versace). This is his first Paris showing in many years.
To mark the publication of Michèle Auer's Histoire d'oeufs à travers 300 photographies de 1840 à nos jours (The History of Eggs Through 300 Photos, from 1840 to Today) by Ides et Calendes, the Marion Meyer gallery (Paris) has culled 35 renditions of this mysterious ovoid that has been an object of wonder and mystery since prehistoric times. Since so many philosophers, scientists, architects sculptors and writers have been obsessed with eggs, it's no wonder that so few photographers have been able to resist its attraction. This show will introduce a wide variety of aesthetic approaches to the egg, from Nadar to Martin Parr, and from Man Ray to Andy Warhol, including Brancusi, Josef Sudek, Jean-Loup Sieff and Joel-Peter Witkin.
Paris Photo offers generous groups of photos that add up to solo shows in themselves,allowing visitors to more deeply examine the work of particular artistsand the course of their development.
"City Life" at the Michael Hoppen Photography gallery (London) celebrates Paris and photography. A large part of the stand will be given over to Robert Doisneau, along with Willy Ronis, Gordon Parks, Pal Funk Angelo, Ernst Haas and Colin Jones. In particular, it features an extraordinary presentation of vintage photos from the "Le Regard Oblique" series done by Doisneau in 1949 after the success of his anecdotal photos sold to Life, Picture Post and Point de Vue. His friend, the gallerist Romi, had just acquired a nude painting by Wagner, which he exhibited in the window of his establishment on the rue de Seine, a courageous gesture at that time. Of course, the painting soon attracted much attention. Amused by the very different reactions of passers-by, Doisneau perched his Rolleiflex inconspicuously on his knee and shot a dozen photos of unsuspecting pedestrians within the space of a couple of hours. The result, which Doisneau called his "Earthly Comedy", appeared at that time in the illustrated magazine Point de Vue.
Arnold Newman is a legend in the history of photography. Born in 1918, this New Yorker revolutionized photographic portraiture by replacing the classical treatment derived from traditional painting with a symbolic approach meant to unveil the personality of the subject. In these portraits, the subject's environment is never just a background. "When I make a portrait", Newman explained, "I don’t take a photograph, I build it, seeking all those graphic elements that will express the most typical common denominator of the subject as I see him within the obvious limitations of a single image". Although Newman's portrait of Piet Mondrian is quite well-known, visitors to the stand of Rudolf Kicken (Cologne) will be delighted to discover an extensive selection from his œuvre.
Florence Chevallier, winner of the Prix Niépce in 1998, took a searching look at couples and "the childhood of humanity" in her three-part "L'Enchantement". The Filles du Calvaire gallery (Paris) is presenting the entirety of this 1996 series, 31 photos in all. Also: Gilbert Garcin, Elizabeth Lennard, Mireille Loup, Paul Pouvreau, Corinne Mercadier and Sylvaine Solard. Chevallier's beautiful, highly painterly tableaux, infused with light and magnificent colours, often recall idyllic scenes in the garden of Eden. Thanks to the narrative form she deploys in this series, "L'Enchantement" is fraught with ambiguity, and the characters face a number of possible futures. Our gaze is invited to make multiple readings of this unfolding story-in-progress, sliding from one image to another as though watching a movie.
A solo exhibition of the work of Horst Paul Horst is this year's offering by the Hamiltons gallery from London. With its elegant portraits immortalizing Coco Chanel, Marlene Dietrich, Gertrude Stein, Luchino Visconti, Ginger Rogers, Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger and Calvin Klein, this is more than an ensemble of vintage prints. It is a voyage through a century of the arts, fashion, literature and film. The American photographer (born in Germany) is known for his neo-classical refinement and the theatricality of his chiaroscuro. He made an indelible mark on Vogue magazine, whose Parisian studios he directed starting in 1935. His The Mainbocher Corset (1939), with its erotically-charged melancholy, remains one of the key photos of the 20th century.
Ton Peek (Utrecht) is giving over a major part of his stand to Lionel Wendt (1900-1944), with some 40 vintage silver prints made during the last eight years of the artist's life, mostly collage-portraits of Ceylonese men. Artistically close to George Platt-Lynes, Wendt rarely left Ceylon, at that time a Dutch possession. He was also a pianist and belonged to a circle of artists known as "the Group of 43" along with Audrey Collette and the painter George Keyt. Side by side with Wendt's work, Ton Peek is also showing photos by Aernout Overbecke–a dozen recent landscapes taken by the Dutch photographer in the U.S.–and large-format albuminized prints by Adolphe Braun, his "Photographed Flowers" series taken in the 1850s.
The Frank gallery (Paris) will exhibit photos by Ariane Lopez-Huici. After her work on the Laksmana temples in India and Bernini masterpieces in Italy, the photographer decided to take up living subjects. In her 1994-95 series "Aviva de Manhattan", a corpulent Venus parades her nudity with majesty, humour and self-assurance. In her erotic work, very much informed by sculpture, Lopez-Huici celebrates the integrity and independence of the body, with none of the artifice and aestheticization often associated with this genre. Another contemporary photographer, the American Connie Imboden, will be featured by the Esther Woerdehoff gallery (Paris) with a retrospective and showing of her recent work. Imboden requires no dark-room or digital manipulation to achieve her surreal images. She sets mirrors afloat in the night-time waters of her swimming pool, which capture disconcerting fragments of naked bodies gleaming in the dark.
The exhibition entitled "Still Lifes" at the Baudoin Lebon gallery (Paris) will centre on Joel-Peter Witkin recent "Vanitas" and floral photography by Robert Mapplethorpe done during his last years (Flower Arrangement, 1984, silver print; Orchid, 1986). Witkin very carefully prepared the making of his hallucinatory images, with their allegoric scenes inspired by mythology or art history. In the confines of his studio, he used painted backgrounds and accessories to turn his characters (deformed and sick beings, often fairground freaks) into icons transfigured by the sacred. Since 1990, the corpses of humans and animals have become a defining motif in his Vanitas– hence the recent Christlike vision of a crucified foot (Still-Life with Mirror, 1998).
One of Paris Photo's priorities is to promote the most recent and cutting-edge photography, with work by many young and emerging artistsfrom all over the globe.
Philippe Bazin, winner of the Prix Niépce in 1999, photographs the faces of contemporary people in relationship with their particular locus, their social topology as the philosopher Michel Foucault called it. Hospitals, schools, nurseries–in bringing out the tension between the individual and the institution, these photographs also underline the Otherness, the total singularity, of each of us. For example, his 1993-95 series of photos of teenagers fixed on some hundred middle school children in the city of Calais. The high point of this project is the series of faces of new-born children in a maternity ward in Maubeuge (1998), shown for the first time in Paris by the Anne Barrault gallery. The photo portraits presented here by Barrault also include work by Bill Jacobson (the "Interim Portrait" series), Eric Nehr (his "Plural Portrait" suite) and Anne Deguelle, who explores mirror effects, identity and (non) coincidence in her "double portraits" of various artists as young children (Double Portrait, Marcel Proust, 1998).
The photos of Elger Esser (1967, Stuttgart) seem to come from some distant era of the past. Without the slightest nostalgia, although definitely conscious of his relationship to art history and painting in particular, this former Becher student produces very large-format landscapes that seem half-painting, half-photography. These elegant, lyrical pieces will be hung by the 213, Marion de Beaupré gallery (Paris) along with work by four young women photographers–Marcy Robinson (USA), Vanina Sorrenti (Italy), Isabel Truniger (Switzerland) and Camille Vivier (France)–chosen by Marion de Beaupré for "their gift at piercing through appearances".
For The Photographers’ Gallery (London), Elizabeth Smith chose three women artists: Annelies Strba (Switzerland, who for 20 years has photographed her family as if writing a diary), Kate Belton, and Carey Young. Belton (1972, UK) was shown at the Whitechapel Open in London this year. She uses paper, cardboard, glue and paint to make miniature spaces–an office, living room, artist's studio–located somewhere on the far reaches of reality where it slides into fiction. Whether showing a robbery or domestic violence, each of these scenes seems to have been suddenly touched by madness, in contrast to the impeccable surface of the Cibachrome mounted on aluminium. Young, born in Zimbabwe in 1970, speaks of her work as an investigation into contemporary communications. She uses videos, photos and mixed media produced in collaboration with science fiction writers and IT experts. Her take on fibre optics, a cross between modern painting and a biological diagram (the Wired series, 1997-98), reveals the "secret life" of electronic data transmission.
Jean-Baptiste Huynh's series "Intimate Infinity" was the basis for a book of the same name published last year by Actes Sud. For the first time at Paris Photo, the French photographer, awarded the Villa Médici non-resident prize in 1997, will present his latest work, Cibachrome photos of flowers and leaves mounted on aluminium. The treatment of colour as texture imparts an astonishing beauty to these images. In addition to Huynh, the Claude Samuel gallery (Paris) is also showing the most recent production of Laurence Leblanc, who explores young children's first experiments with the world around them, and the tenderly cruel scenes staged and photographed by Anna M. van Thiel de Vries.
As part of its "Contemporary America" exhibition, the Edwynn Houk gallery (New York) is showing Robert ParkeHarrison (1968, USA). A graduate of the University of New Mexico's prestigious photography department, ParkeHarrison is already considered one of the most promising talents of his generation. His images are created by complex technical manipulation. Their central subjects are strange, home-made machines worked by the artist himself, who appears in the persona of a late 19th-century dandy in a stripped suit and cuffed shirt. A detached, Buster Keatonesque humour infuses this enigmatic work, marked by elaborate, evocative pictorialist elements.
For a decade now, the Fovéa gallery (Marseille, France) has been an ardent champion of photography, especially that produced in southern European, through both publications and the exhibitions it holds in Paris, elsewhere in France and abroad. For its first-ever participation in Paris Photo, the gallery is showing six artists. Bruno Cattani (Italy) appropriates museums and other spaces meant for exhibitions to reveal, in a mirror image, what they are really about. Pilar Albajar & Antonio Altarriba (Spain) wield their captioned images transformed by digitization to carry out polemics. After the panoramic views of his "False Resemblances" series, Christian Ramade explores the legendary Hôtel Nord Pinus in Arles (where Van Gogh painted his room), before its restoration.
The only European fair entirely dedicated to photography, Paris Photo hosts artists, gallerists and publishers for whom photography represents an art formthat can enter into dialogue with other artistic media(drawing, painting, film, writing, etc.).
Serge Plantureux created a splash at Paris Photo 98 with a new and spectacular work based on anthropometric classification that became highly sought after by a number of American museums. His presentation of the work of Raoul Haussmann this year will have no less impact. This French artist was a Dadaist's Dadaist, a dancer, sound poet and producer of photomontages. He used to say, "I'm not a photographer, I'm an abstract painter." Among his works: The Wood Demon (1931), a photo of the roots of a tree, a veritable natural sculpture, with the background painted in India ink.
The Galerie du Jour agnès b. has been promoting some 20 young painters and photographers since 1984, with a special concern for finding new forms that bring this art within the reach of everyone (sketches, stencils, silk-screen, books, etc.). Ten artists from the gallery's stable will be presented at Paris Photo 98, including Lucien Hervé, Louis Jammes (the "Chechnya" series) and Massimo Vitali, whose book Beach & Disco just came out. Adjacent to the acidulous work of Martin Paar ("Common Sense" series, 1998), Icons by Kenneth Anger, director of the 1963 cult film Scorpio Rising and author of Hollywood Babylon. Also, another underground auteur, poet and writer, Jonas Mekas (Roy Lichtenstein's model filmed at Andy Warhol's studio). The Whitney Museum held a retrospective of Mekas films in 1992, as did the Jeu de Paume in Paris.
Art Affairs, one of Amsterdam's foremost contemporary art sites, will put up work by four internationally-known photographers: John Hilliard and John Coplans (UK), Dieter Appel and Ulay (Germany). A painter, art critic, founder of Artforum (1962) and chief curator of the Pasadena Art Museum (1967-1970), for the last 20 years Coplans has worked with only one model, himself. His photos of his naked body avoid all false resemblances. They register the passage of time and life, and are testament to a truth about the human condition that canonical aesthetics cannot access.
Patrick Tosani, whose photos bear titles like "Dressed Body", "Clothing", "Heads" and "Body Seen From Below", uses framing to impart a sensation of density to his bodies that is made all the stronger by their fragmentation, disconnection and isolation. "I focus my vision not to ignore reality, but on the contrary, to analyse it," explains the artist, whose work is being shown at Paris Photo by Liliane and Michel Durand-Dessert (Paris). Also, four artists–John Hilliard, George Rousse, Balthasar Burkhard and William Wegman, whose "dog-lover" Polaroids, now acquired by many public collections, mercilessly mock the genre of psychological portrait.
Art books and artists' books: this year eight publishers and bookstores from France and other countries will share this passion with the Paris Photo public. In association with a major Paris photography bookstore, La Chambre Claire, publishers J. A. Vloemans and L. van Paddenburgh (Holland), Rocket (UK) and Dino Simonett (Switzerland) offer books by giants of photography. Jean-Loup Couturier selected some hundred photo books for Temps de Pose (France), including Brassaï's Paris de Nuit, Coburn's London and New York, Métal by Germaine Krull, Danny Lyon's The Bike Rider. Patrick Le Bescout of Filigranes Éditions (France) will present its whole catalogue, along with photos related to recent books: Outreloin bleu by Arièle Bonzon, Mes bonnes résolutions by Gilbert Garcin and Joan Fontcuberta's Le livre rouge.
For Coromandel Express (France/USA), Grégory Leroy and Alexis Fabry will present six artist's books that rank particularly particularly high as collectibles. Each includes texts by distinguished writers opposite original work by contemporary photographers: Christer Strömholm and Yves Martin, Mario Testino and Martin Amis, James Casabere and Mohammed Dib, Mary Ellen Mark and Anita Dessai. For Flowers, Vik Muniz did his own, idiosyncratic version of an 18th-century botanical guide, using photos of artificial flowers from his personal collection. Lynne Tillman, art critic and poet, provides a humorous commentary on the approach taken by this Brazilian artist.
Jan Saudek, shown by the Johannes Faber gallery (Vienna), which specializes in Czech and Austrian photography, is one of many artists who combine photography with work in other disciplines. Also on view at this stand, the Panoramas by Josef Sudek (1898-1976), taken in the 1950s and '60s. Saudek, a transgressive artist for 30 years now has revelled in work that is simultaneously innocent and indecent. His latest, previously unexhibited work will be shown by the Krisal gallery (Geneva). In addition to Lin Delpierre's "urban women", the Zéro l'Infini gallery (Besançon, France) will also present work by the photographer, painter and poet Cozette de Charmoy. She uses assemblages, collages and photographic allegories in her "Memoire in Progress". The roots of her work can be seen in her first book, The True Life of Sweeny Todd, recently shown at France's national library, in the Galerie Colbert.
"Fashion and Photography"The theme of Paris Photo will also be reprised by many individual galleries.Beyond apparel and settings , what is being examined is a whole system of signsand the interplay of images and power.
Fashion has not escaped the penetrating regard of William Klein, this "ogre who eats people with his eyes", as Alain Bergala put it. His documentary Mode in France and the excellent Who Are You, Polly Magoo? are proof of this. With the 1956 publication in Paris of his book New York, Klein the iconoclast thumbed his nose at the traditional aesthetics of a still somewhat frozen genre. In the 1950s he put his models in the street, so that crowds and city lights serve as a contrast to the fashion creations of Saint Laurent, Dior and Grès (Le Réverbère 2 gallery, Lyon, France).
The American photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe (1895-1989) will be shown by Agathe Gaillard (Paris). Originally a painting student, Dahl-Wolfe opened her own photography studio in New York in 1933. For more than 20 years she worked constantly for Harper's Bazaar, whose editors gave her carte blanche. With their relaxed elegance, her enormously skilful compositions created a natural and yet sublime image of the American women, thus prefiguring the work of Irving Penn and Richard Avedon.
Albert Watson, born in Scotland in 1942, is one of today's most sought-after fashion photographers. In addition to his 250 covers for Condé Nast, he has also done publicity campaigns for the biggest brands of clothing and cosmetics, such as The Gap, Estée Lauder, Emporio Armani, Levi's, Revlon, Chanel and L'Oréal. The Rudolf Kicken gallery (Cologne) will show his fashion photography (Charlotte, Prada Blouse, 1986), next to that of Helmut Newton (Night at the Trocadero, 1981, for the French edition of Vogue).
The world of David LaChappelle lies on the other side of the mirror, peopled by the brightly-adorned icons of contemporary culture–rock stars, stars of the catwalk and just plain Hollywood stars, starlets and star dust. This former worker from the Warhol factory (or more precisely, Interview magazine) is not into the aesthetics of wretchedness. He will turn the space of the Kamel Mennour gallery (Paris) into a virtual (if not virtuous) reality where he pursues the rich and famous so resolutely that they almost seem to turn into caricatures of themselves.
With his narrative style reminiscent of "noir" movies, the world of fashion has come to hold Struan in awe as a photographer and director. Wonderbra, Elizabeth Arden, Vogue Bra–not to mention Pepsi and Club Med–have called on his fine sense of beauty and lighting. Struan is the only fashion photographer whose work has been acquired by Canada's National Archives. His photos will be on view for the first time in Europe at the stand of the Krisal gallery (Switzerland).
The pin-up photos show "Claudia" and "Christy T" made up, dressed and undressed exactly like their homonyms. The models of Erwin Olaf (Flatland gallery, Holland) exhibit the same saucy self-assurance as the hottest catwalk creature. The only difference is that these dozen women and men are elderly, to say the least. Without seeking to be either provocative or flattering, Olaf is able to do his subjects justice, while forcing the viewer to confront one of the strongest taboos in Western society: old age and the impermissibility of showing it off.
The photos of Sarah Moon (1941, Paris) have lent their aura of mystery to the pages of many magazines. The Jane Corkin gallery (Toronto) will show her most recent large-format (74 x 57 cm), colour work. Moon is more concerned with the memory of clothing than garments themselves. She transforms the designs of Yohji Yamamoto, Gaultier and Chanel into evanescent silhouettes bathed in amber, turquoise or lie-de-vin.
Elaine Constantine is a rising star of fashion photography in Britain. Since 1993 when she left Nick Knight to launch her own career, she has developed a dynamic, positive style that is often exuberant and extremely colourful (The Face, Arena, Homme Plus magazines). It could be the forerunner of a whole new trend in photography. The 213, Marion de Beaupré gallery (Paris) will show Constantine's work beside that of Camille Vivier, who won first prize at the twelfth annual festival of the fashion arts at Hyères (France) in 1997 and has worked for Purple and Harper's Bazaar in the U.S.
Cindy Sherman, is, as they say, a woman who needs no introduction. The retrospective of her work already been such a hit in Los Angeles, Sydney and Bordeaux will be in Toronto until January 2000. Rooted in conceptual art, her metamorphoses are meant to question the idea of representation as well as play out her own very personal dramas. As was to be expected, she scrutinizes the world of fashion through the prism of crucial problematics–gender identity, violence, stereotypes. The many persona of this woman of a thousand faces, from the female ideal of the 1950s to the disturbing dolls of her most recent surrealistic portraits, will be shown by the Edwynn Houk gallery.