Paris Photo 2025: Discovering Treasures of Photography Past and Present
A Journey Through the Grand Palais Where Emerging Voices Meet Established Masters
There's something electric about returning to the Grand Palais for Paris Photo, especially when it marks the fair's second consecutive year back in this venue. The soaring glass-and-steel architecture becomes a cathedral for the medium, and this year's edition delivered both reverence for photography's legends and genuine excitement for its future.
Daniela Selva
Yes, there were the expected masters—William Klein, Sally Mann, Seydou Keïta and Paolo Roversi. But the real magic of Paris Photo lies in those moments when you turn a corner and discover something—someone—who stops you in your tracks. A name you've never encountered. A vision that feels simultaneously fresh and essential. That's what we're here for: new discoveries that awaken something in us.
Marleen Sleeuwits
At Galerie Bart's booth, Marleen Sleeuwits—a Dutch photographer whose images operate at the intersection of architectural precision and emotional resonance. Her photographs possess a quietness that demands you lean in closer, revealing layers of meaning in seemingly simple compositions.
Franco Fontana
Polka Galerie presented Franco Fontana's Nudo (1990), a striking example of how this Italian master transformed the human form into pure abstraction through color and composition. The work is simultaneously a Polaroid transfer on cardboard collage—tactile, handmade, intimate—and a bold statement about photography's relationship to painting.
Priced at €2,000 this piece represents Fontana at his most experimental. The Nudo series strips away context, focusing entirely on the interplay between flesh tones and vivid color fields. It's sensual without being literal, abstract without losing its connection to the body.
What makes this work particularly compelling is its materiality—the Polaroid transfer process creates an image that exists between photography and painting, between documentation and pure color study. In an era of infinite digital reproducibility, there's something powerful about a unique photographic object you can hold in your hands.
Tania Franco Klein
We've been admirers of Tania Franco Klein since 2020, so seeing her work at Rosegallery's booth felt like reconnecting with a friend whose career we've watched flourish. Her Dear Stranger portrait continues her exploration of contemporary alienation, loneliness, and the strange intimacy of urban life. Some photographers you discover once. Others you grow with.
Atong Atem
One of the most significant discoveries of Paris Photo 2025 was encountering the work of Atong Atem, a Sudanese-Australian photographer whose portraits explore identity, diaspora, and the construction of cultural memory.
Atem's work operates in the space between documentation and mythology.
What strikes you immediately about Atem's photography is its confidence. These are images that know exactly what they want to say about beauty, belonging, and the complexity of navigating multiple cultural identities. Her work feels simultaneously rooted in the tradition of studio portraiture (echoes of Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé) while pushing the form into entirely contemporary conversations about representation and self-definition.
This is an artist to watch.
Other Artists Who Caught Our Eye
Beyond these highlighted discoveries, Paris Photo 2025 offered glimpses of several other photographers we love.
Casper Faassen – Akaya (2024)
Faassen's work bridges photography and painting, creating hybrid objects that question where one medium ends and another begins.
Martine Gutierrez – Neo-Indeo, Chuj Mini Gag, p25 from Indigenous Woman (2018)
Medium: Chromogenic print
Gutierrez's ongoing project Indigenous Woman positions the artist as subject, creator, and cultural commentator.
Sybren Vanoverberghe – Wall (2025)
Medium: Archival pigment print on cotton paper, acrylic glass, aluminum frame, screws
Dimensions: 137.5 × 44 × 2 cm (14 4/5 × 17 3/10 × 4/5 in)
Vanoverberghe's sculptural approach to photography—emphasized by the inclusion of "screws" in the medium description—suggests work that engages with installation and the physical space of display. Wall is less a window than a constructed object that occupies the space between photography, sculpture, and architecture.
Why New Names Matter
In an art world that can feel dominated by blue-chip names and market-driven canonization, there's something revolutionary about championing photographers whose work hasn't yet been absorbed into the mainstream narrative.
This is what keeps us returning to Paris Photo year after year. Not just to see William Klein's New York or Sally Mann's American South (though we never tire of those), but to discover the photographers who will define the next chapter of this medium.
