The announcement of the results of the American election this time hardly disturbed sales at the Paris Photo fair. “In 2016, during Trump’s first election, some collectors canceled sales”remembers the American gallery owner Hans Kraus. This specialist in 19th century photographye century is offering on its stand a rare landscape from 1856, signed by the British Roger Fenton (1819-1869), where the clouds take the spotlight, at $495,000. On Wednesday November 6, several dealers had already sold works, like Gil Rigoulet, who devoted his entire stand to modernist photography – with a very mysterious photo by Roger Parry (1905-1977), a solarized montage from 1930 which superimposes a hand and a Paris metro map, at 20,000 euros.
The great world fair of still images makes a successful return to the Grand Palais, in Paris, with a tenfold increase in space (21,000 square meters compared to 16,000 before the restoration of the building), where traffic has become significantly more fluid in the aisles , with new open spaces upstairs. The 2024 edition is especially striking for the significant presence of classic works in black and white of modest size, after years of domination of color, and of contemporary art in very large format. Impossible to miss, upon entering, the spectacular installation “Men of the 20the century”, masterpiece of the portraitist August Sander (1876-1964), who attempted a typology of German society shaken by the two world wars, presented here in full with its 619 images, in prints from the 1990s, by his great-grandson, the gallery owner Julian Sander – for a price of “several million euros”.
Photojournalistes
There are also, throughout the fair, a number of photos of Robert Frank (1924-2019), whose hundredth anniversary of his birth is being celebrated on Saturday, November 9 – the Pace gallery presents portraits of artists such as Allen Ginsberg, Willem de Kooning or Jack Kerouac taken by the photographer. Several gallery owners also dedicate their stand to photojournalists: Gilles Caron (1939-1970), on the stand of the Anne-Laure Buffard gallery, with some vintage prints rare, or the Spaniard Ramon Masats (1931-2024), at the Alta gallery. It is a former photojournalist, Denis Malartre (1952-2017), who occupies the entire stand of the gallery owner Thierry Bigaignon: for two years, locked up in his home, he composed an abstract and minimalist work, sold as a unique set of 50 images, at 230,000 euros.
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