Kunang Helmi, Contributor, Paris
The majority of attending gallery owners pronounced the 9th edition of Paris Photo, which ended on Nov. 20, as exceptional -- in the sense that they sold many photographic works.
A gallery owner from Finland, Timothy Persons, conceded that he sold everything apart from two small prints, while Christian Caujolle from Vu gallery in Paris spoke of a bumper crop.
Howard Greenberg from New York, known as one of the world's foremost photo dealers and who is a member of the panel that selected the 106 participating galleries or publishers to the fair, said: ""For me, it is the most important photo fair in the world, and more than ever Americans, gallery owners, collectors and photographers attend this event.""
The American market for photography is the most important in the world.
According to the organizers, Reed Exhibitions, at least 40,000 visitors -- professionals and amateurs included -- came to the fair, while Galerie Filles du Calvaire said 65 percent of their buyers were from abroad.
Each year, a country is chosen as guest of honor, and this year, it was Spain, represented by eight galleries with permanent solo exhibitions of work by artists born between 1960 and 1975, such as Pablo Genoves or Naa del Castillo. The Central Exhibition of Paris Photo unveiled the latest acquisitions to the photo collection of the Community of Madrid.
Spaniard Anthony Goicolea was declared the winner of the BMW-Paris Photo Prize for Photography, with the theme Spirit on the Move and endowed with a 12,000-euros cash prize. Goicolea's large color work entitled Ghost Ship won from among 29 short-listed participants.
Ghost Ship is part of Goicolea's recent series called Sheltered Life. Digitally enhanced, the image represents a fairy -tale landscape: a giant tree rises out of a devastated, almost lunar environment.
Another entry in the competition, Pink in Paradise by Manit Sriwanichpoom from Thailand, showed a man wearing a pink jacket near a pink chair, both on a cliff bordering a foaming Balinese seascape with the Uluwatu temple visible in the distance.
Galerie Van Kranendonk of The Hague also featured Indonesia-themed work, by Wijnanda Deroo from her show Indonesia.
Among the featured large-format, realistic color prints of her 2005 stay in Indonesia, sponsored by Erasmus, were those of an interior of a royal house in Solo and the Cirebon train station at night. Her 30-inch by 40-inch chromogenic dye coupler prints, available in a limited edition of only five, were sold for 3,500 euros a piece.
Another Dutch gallery, Ton Peek Photography in Utrecht, surprisingly showed a few vintage prints alongside their largely contemporary selection. Among these, a Woodbury and Page print of Bogor bore a very reasonable 350-euro price tag.
Meanwhile, a Roger Fenton vintage print of a man aiming with a rifle obtained 140,000 euros in the 19th-century section of New York gallery Hans Kraus.
Apart from these vintage prints, artists from between 1920 and 1930 sold well, such as the several Man Ray prints sold by Frenchman Serge Plantureux for around 90,000 euros each. However, a Man Ray abstract photo on his stand marked at 200,000 euros remained unsold by midday of the last day.
Galerie Pavot sold a nude by American Edward Weston from the same period for 350,000 euros to a French museum. Agathe Gaillard, whose gallery celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, sold a 1930s Henri Cartier-Bresson print of a pair of Mexican lesbians, signed and dedicated to Luis Bunuel by the photographer, for 48,000 euros.
Apparently the period between 1960 and 1970 fared particularly well, with prints by Diane Arbus or William Eggleston topping the market -- the latter selling US$18,000 worth of prints -- while Lewis Baltz was also popular together with Stephen Shore.
Arbus, with her portraits of social misfits, is the subject of a large retrospective at London's Victoria and Albert Museum, and her Child with a Grenade topped the photo auction in April at Christie's New York at $408,000.
Although a traditional photography connoisseur such as former Magnum Paris photo editor James Fox may maintain that ""All these trash, huge, digitally modified color prints which is now termed contemporary art is definitely not photography"", the trend is definitely leaning toward this concept of modern photography.
To give an idea, such digitally modified prints in a smaller format, like those of 30-year-old American Loretta Lux, go for 20,000 euros these days.
Next year's Paris Photo will take place from Nov. 16 through Nov. 19, and the guest of honor will be the Nordic countries Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.
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