Paris Photo 2016 | Where to find the most talented young photographers

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The 2016 edition of Paris Photo, the fair’s twentieth and the second organized by duo florence and Christoph Wiesner, brings together more than 1,200 artists, represented by 178 exhibitors worldwide.

Exhibited works include photographs by superstar artists including, among others, Cindy Sherman, (Gagosian Gallery, Bruce Silverstein) Richard Prince, (Gagosian, Sophie Scheidecker) or Andreas Gursky (also represented by Gagosian) as well as photography’s earlier exponents, notably Man Ray, whose works are shown by as many as 12 galleries.

 

What is rarer to find however, are photographers under 40, with galleries preferring to exhibit more established artists that they are sure to sell. So to help you sniff them out, we’ve compiled a list of the best younger photographers to discover under the majestic glass roof of the Grand Palais between November 10 and 13.

 

For some younger artists “the line between ‘traditional’ photographers and artists working with several media is increasingly blurred,” says CJ Heyliger exhibiting at Gallery Luisotti. “Art education and artistic practices are becoming more interdisciplinary, whilst technology’s evolution has slowly redefined the definition of the medium. It’s a unique moment in photography’s history.”

 

For James Tylor of Stills Gallery, the medium’s evolution should encourage artists to produce better quality work. For Tylor, “a photo-artist that uses several medias will bring new and alternative ideas to the photography making process.”

 

Elsewhere, Thibault Brunet, who’s showing with Binôme Galerie, believes that the perception of photography as a distinct medium from others is perpetrated by institutions, not the artists. “If we ask young photographers, they see no differences, but art collectors can appreciate this distinction”. Mustapha Azeroual, also showing with Binôme, agrees that working around the medium brings artists to abstract from the image, and from the expectations of verisimilitude expected from photography.

 

Here are our picks of the most interesting work by young photographers:

 

HAPPENING

13:27 - 150° - Lake Los Angeles, CA

CJ Heyliger, showing with Gallery Luisotti


“The photographs on display this year are new, and depict improvised sundials that I make out in the California desert.  The sundial being a perfect manifestation of the two key elements of photography - time and light - working in unison.  These pieces are part of an ongoing series titled Precious Metal is Hard to Find which, while rooted in a landscape photography practice, utilizes subject matter of a more performative or constructed origin.  I like thinking of the body of work as a series of attempts to make something out of nothing.”



HAPPENING

Hidden in the Shadows

James Tylor at Stills Gallery

I have used a hybrid of digital and analogue photography processes in three different photographic series about Australian and New Zealand's history. In two of my photographic series ‘Karta (The Island of the Dead)’ and ‘Territorial Encounters’. I have used the 19th century Daguerreotype process to highlight how the British colonised South Australia in the 19th century and discuss how colonisation has affected Aboriginal people in South Australia. In the third series ‘Aotearoa My Hawaiki’ used photographs of the New Zealand landscape to talk about my Māori family migrating for New Zealand to Australia and how that has changed my Māori identity and my connect to New Zealand.  

 


Ubari, Southern Libya, 2015. Tuareg tribe militiamen playing babyfoot on Tende Mount, from the Series The Dynamics of the Dust, 2015

Philippe Dudouit, showing with East Wing Gallery

Photographer Philippe Dudouit showcases works detailing a cartography of Saharan dynamics: his images show conflict zones in Libya, marked by illegal trafficking, anti-terrorism and the movements of migrants.
 


HAPPENING


Les mécaniques 1, 2016 168 x 205 cm detail of a triptych.

Noémie Goudal at Filles du Calvaire Gallery

For Paris Photo, Noémie Goudal debuts one of the latest photographs from her series Southern Light Station and reveals one of the first works from Les mécaniques: a monumental triptych created in the jungle which will be presented in the PRISMES section.



 
HAPPENING


serie ELLIOS#1, 2016

Azeroual Mustapha, showing with Binôme Galerie — € 300  for editions, other works up to € 12.000 

The works I am presenting give an insight into my various research into the nature and the scope of photography; it’s a working process based on observation and experimentation that brought me to bring historical shooting techniques in dialogue with the more contemporary issues of photography.
 

 
HAPPENING

Typologie du virtuel, sans-titre #1, 2014-16

Thibault Brunet at Binôme Galerie

Brunet presents a selection from the different projects he has been working on in recent years; notably photographs depicting a virtual world, or resembling it: his works, created with hyper-contemporary tools such as 3D and google earth, are somewhere between reality and fiction.
 


HAPPENING

Statuette Punu, Bintou, Guinée, Ya Kala Ben, 2011

Namsa Leuba, at in camera galerie 

Born to a Guinean mother and Swiss father, Namsa Leuba questions the representation of African identities through colors, gestures and props. The series Yaka La Ben, (“points of view” in Maninka dialect) exploring “bestial fetishes”, saw the light of day in a Guinean village, where her family comes from. “During the course of many months, I participated in numerous rituals and ceremonies. In Guinean cosmology, statuettes represent the roots of the living and their spirits, and fetishes bring them to prayer. My intention was to make the invisible visible. I placed models in front of the camera, but I also embellished their dresses by adorning them with elements such as my own hair. I was trying to separate these artifacts from their traditional context to immortalize them in a Western framework”.



Photo courtesy artists and their gallerists