Paris Photo

Upcoming
Nov 13 – Nov 16, 2025
Paris

ART FAIR DETAILS

Paris Photo
Booth C23
Grand Palais
Nov 13 – 16, 2025

PRESS

Press Release

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Above: Installation view, Pace at Paris Photo, Booth C23, Nov 13 – 16, 2025

At the 2025 edition of Paris Photo, Pace will present a curated selection of works by over 20 artists, underscoring the breadth and history of the gallery’s program.

The presentation will feature a selection of photographs by seminal 20th-century figures—Diane Arbus, Irving Penn, and Robert Frank among them—alongside works by leading contemporary artists, including Richard Learoyd, RaMell Ross, and Kiki Smith. The booth will also debut never-before-seen images by Emmet Gowin, ahead of his solo exhibition at Pace’s 508 West 25th Street gallery in New York next year.

Lauren Panzo, Vice President at Pace, says:

"With a history steeped in the medium, Pace is thrilled to return to Paris Photo. The works on view—a compelling dialogue between new and old—not only highlight photography's incredible range but also affirm its crucial place within the broader history of modern and contemporary art."

Highlights on Pace’s booth include:

Recent works by Yto Barrada, who will represent France at the Venice Biennale in 2026 and is currently the subject of a major solo exhibition on view at the South London Gallery through January 11, 2026

Experimental and abstract photographs by Harry Callahan and Alfred Stieglitz, illustrating the innovative potential of the medium

Polaroids by Lucas Samaras, whose survey exhibition Master of the Uncanny is currently on view at The Intermission in Piraeus, Greece, presented in collaboration with Pace

A photograph by Gordon Parks taken backstage at the storied New York nightclub The Latin Quarter—formally The Cotton Club—in 1958

From the Bleacher Series: Charleston (Victorian house), 1952, (1990) by Robert Rauschenberg, a large-format black-and-white composition made from Polaroid photographs mounted on aluminum, in which the artist rephotographed and manipulated earlier imagery. This year marks the centenary of Rauschenberg’s birth on October 22, 1925

Portraits by Paolo Roversi, who was recently the subject of a focused retrospective, titled Along the Way, at Pace in New York

Dafne’s Song (2023) by Lucia Engstrom, hand-embroidered with silk thread and unspun mohair, highlighting the artist’s meticulous approach to material and texture

Works from Paul Graham’s series Verdigris / Ambergris, recently released in a pair of sibling books published by MACK, completing a twelve-year meditation on life’s transience and mortality

Vintage prints by Richard Avedon, Peter Hujar, and Weegee, among others

Landscape photography, including Richard Misrach’s Pyramid Lake (Last Light) (1997) and JoAnn Verburg’s Something New Near Bazzano (2000), that reflect the varied ways photographers have engaged with place

A photograph and a drawing by William Christenberry, both depicting the same Alabama church in 1981 and 1988, highlighting the artist's practice of revisiting subjects across mediums

Velka Lomnica (1966) from Josef Koudelka’s renowned Gypsies series, a selection of which are currently on view as part of a dedicated artist display at London’s Tate Modern

Featured Works

Yto Barrada

b. 1971, Paris

Taken from her film A Day is Not a Day (2022), Yto Barrada’s photographs capture close up stills from the film. A Day is Not a Day, which was included in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, weaves together footage from two weather acceleration facilities, located in Miami and Phoenix, Arizona, that study how industrial materials —textiles, plastics, glass, and paints—age and decay under different conditions. Scenes of neighboring fields flourishing with plant and animal life are juxtaposed with the workers who measure the materials’ slow decay, which can be hastened by sun exposure, moisture, temperature fluctuations, dust, salt, and organic matter. Although such changes are imperceptible in real time, the facilities’ tests, like Barrada’s film, reveal striking contrasts between stages of decay. Blue Peel (Film still from “A Day is Not a Day, 2022”) (2024) isolates one instance of this erosion, functioning as a fragmentary record within a larger network of materials under observation.

Barrada’s artistic process, including her use of natural fabrics and dyes and her access to plants and insects, is directly affected by drought, fire, and other effects of climate change. The degradation of materials in her film serves as a metaphor for the planet’s fragility as rising temperatures and extreme weather events disproportionately impact communities across the globe. “Through the work of making colors with nature, I’m reevaluating and unlearning the value of time,”¹ the artist explained in a 2023 interview with Amy DuFault. In A Day is Not a Day, Barrada accelerates the passage of time, demonstrating that the perception of time, climate change, and their effects are not felt equally across all environments.

Yto Barrada, “ (opens in a new window) Sunday Visit: In Tangier With Yto Barrada,” interview by Amy DuFault, Botanical Colors, 10 December 2023

Harry Callahan

b. 1912, Detroit, Michigan
d. 1999, Atlanta, Georgia

Lucia Engstrom

Lucia Engstrom’s Baltic Blue (2023) is a three-dimensional homage to her roots in the Swedish archipelago. A photograph of still waters in the Baltic Sea reflecting a partially cloudy sky creates a painterly field of blues and whites, upon which Engstrom introduces an abstract embroidered element, adding texture and dimensionality to the picture plane. Threads of silk, wool, and mohair in richly varied tones of blue, green, and black extend from the photograph’s natural horizon line; the forms above and below it hazily mirror each other. Tight, fine stitches contrast with loose, cloudlike sections of wool: the embroidery above the horizon is more precise, while the reflected portion below comprises more relaxed, softer stitches, evocative of the movement of water.

Engstrom’s intervention extends her photographic practice into a sculptural register. The needlework transforms the photograph from a document into a dreamscape, collapsing the distance between observation and imagination. Shaped by a nomadic childhood, Engstrom’s practice reflects the influence of Scandinavian textiles and the rich folk art of Russia and China she encountered throughout the late 1980s and ’90s. These varied influences converge in Baltic Blue, where meticulous hand-embroidery overlays a photograph of a place deeply personal to the artist with the expressive possibilities of thread. Produced in an edition of three, each print is individually hand-embroidered, rendering every work unique.

Robert Frank

b. 1924, Zurich, Switzerland
d. 2019, Nova Scotia, Canada

Emmet Gowin

b. 1941, Danville, Virginia

Through my marriage to Edith Morris, in 1964, I entered a family freshly different from my own. I admired their simplicity and generosity and thought of the pictures I made as agreements. I wanted to pay attention to the body and personality that had agreed out of love to reveal itself. My attention was a natural duty which could honor that love.

Danville takes its name from the Dan River and sits on the rolling southern Piedmont border of Virginia and North Carolina. The John and Reva Morris Family lived at the bottom of Baldwin Street, which sits at the far western edge of a cotton mill town, Danville, Virginia. Danville was home to Dan River Mills and was self-proclaimed as the “World’s Best” tobacco market. Today, Danville is better known as the “Last Capitol of the Confederacy.”

The bottom of Baldwin Street came to a dead end, embraced then by a circle of low woods. It was here that the city itself seemed to disappear and time seemed less important. By 1960, what had been Frederick Booher’s market garden and grazing fields were almost all overgrown. The last five or six houses on Baldwin Street also formed a half circle and belonged to members of this extended family, including the grown children of Fred and Rennie Booher. Reva Booher Morris, one of five daughters, and Edith’s mother, lived in the last house on the right. For over fifty years, those houses and yards, along with Reva’s garden on Baldwin Street, all the children, the aunts and uncles, that small but intensely vivid and inspiring world, was in my mind the true center of the world. The kingdom of heaven seemed to be all around us, everywhere I looked. Through Edith and her family, Baldwin Street became the center of my spiritual universe.

Edith Morris was born on Baldwin Street. Between 1940 and 1943, John and Reva Morris had four girls: Mae, Ruth, Edith, and Helen. Only later did I learn that even before I knew there was an Edith, her family knew my family. My father had, for two years, pastored a Methodist church at the top of the hill, on the Old Martinsville Road, which Edith’s mother, Reva, told me they regularly attended.

In December of 1960, a friend, who also played football for the high school, asked me to tag along to the YWCA Saturday Night Dance. There was someone he wanted me to meet. “There she is,” Jim said. I watched Edith dance for a few minutes and then the contest was over. I think she won the contest, but even if she didn’t, I was clear about one thing: she was the most alive person I’d ever met. By Christmas, I was selling things I treasured to buy Edith a first present. We dated for almost four years and married in 1964, just before my last year of art school. Over all these years, Edith has been my guide and informant in all things, especially on the subject of life and Baldwin Street.

Most of the photographs of Baldwin Street have not been published before. Many were only printed for the first time during the pandemic from 2020 to 2022. Some images I knew were authentic even when I was young; others I recognized only once the negatives were rediscovered. Until then, I simply did not have the skill or the right frame of mind to print most of them. Looking back, the key family years were from 1963 to1978, but I never lost interest in the gestures or the faces of this dearest of families. It was here that I came of age and found my first true subject.

Emmet Gowin
October 3, 2025

Peter Hujar

b. 1934, Trenton, New Jersey
d. 1987, New York

Richard Learoyd

b. 1966, Nelson, United Kingdom

Untitled Poppies by Richard Learoyd — Richard Learoyd, *Untitled Poppies*, 2025, camera obscura Ilfochrome photograph mounted to aluminum, 43-1/2" × 41" (110.5 cm × 104.1 cm), image, paper, and mount 51-5/8" × 49-1/4" (131.1 cm × 125.1 cm), frame

Richard Misrach

b. 1949, Los Angeles, California

Irving Penn

b. 1917, Plainfield, New Jersey
d. 2009, New York

Molyneux Pocket Detail (B) by Irving Penn — Irving Penn, *Molyneux Pocket Detail (B)*, Paris, 1950, gelatin silver print mounted to board, 10-7/8" × 10-7/16" (27.6 cm × 26.5 cm), image and paper 13" × 13" (33 cm × 33 cm), mount

Robert Rauschenberg

b. 1925, Port Arthur, Texas
d. 2008, Captiva, Florida

From the Bleacher Series: Pleasure Island (house on pilings), 1952 by Robert Rauschenberg — Robert Rauschenberg, *From the Bleacher Series: Pleasure Island (house on pilings), 1952*, 1990, four black and white Polaroid photographs mounted to aluminum, 25" × 21-3/4" (63.5 cm × 55.2 cm), each paper 50-1/2" × 43" (128.3 cm × 109.2 cm), overall image 53" × 45" (134.6 cm × 114.3 cm), mount

Robert Rauschenberg was introduced to photography as a student at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, where he studied between 1949 and 1952. When he traveled between New York and the South during these years, the city of Charleston became one of his earliest and most frequent subjects. Although not primarily known as a photographer, Rauschenberg often used photography in his sculptures and paintings.

In From the Bleacher Series: Charleston, 1952 (1990), Rauschenberg revisits a haunting image of a home with double decker porch and two gabled windows that he took in 1952. He rephotographed the image in his New York studio in the late ’80s, producing both single and multi-panel enlargements. He then applied wide, uneven brushstrokes of a protective print coater typically used to prevent silver from bleaching. The work was later sent to his studio in Captiva, Florida, where he subjected it to a series of processes—including exposure to sunlight, bleaching, and pressurized water— before mounting it on an aluminum panel. Rauschenberg’s hand is evident in the gestural brushstrokes visible across the surface, making this work a carefully considered monument to his time in the South and an example of his distinctive ability to blur the boundaries between artistic categories using both conventional and experimental techniques.

RaMell Ross

b. 1982, Frankfurt, Germany

In RaMell Ross’s Hale’s Angels (2022), a stretch of Hale County, Alabama’s distinctive red soil is marked by circular and sweeping impressions, described by one writer as “. . . whorls in the soil, winglike shapes left behind on the snowless red earth, the dirt angels of Hale’s Angels.”¹ Ross created these imprints in a process he documented on video, which will be shown at Paris Photo alongside the photograph. The video offers processual insight into the work’s making, and as an unembellished record of sound and gesture, the footage serves as an evidentiary companion to the photograph.

In this large-scale image, the red soil—owing its hue to iron oxide, produced as minerals weather in the region’s humid climate—becomes both subject and surface, emblematic of the material and conceptual ground that anchors the artist’s practice. Ross’s engagement with Hale County soil extends beyond photography to sculpture, as in the series Earth, Dirt, Soil, Land (2021), in which the artist encloses Hale County soil within constructed reliquaries. In his focus on the Alabama landscape, Ross also echoes William Christenberry, who incorporated Hale County’s red dirt directly into exhibitions as both material and motif—an approach Ross revisits through a contemporary lens that foregrounds Black experience. Ross’s oeuvre reclaims narratives of Black life in Hale County, a site mediated through the perspectives of white documentarians for eight decades since the 1941 publication of James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Ross moved to Hale County in 2009, where he lived full-time for three years and now maintains a home; he stated in 2024 that it is now the only place he photographs.² Ross’s acclaimed film Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018), and his recent feature Nickel Boys (2024), nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, extend his commitment to representing the South through lived experience and formal invention.