Photography, fashion and surrealism meet in Paris Photo

Photography and fashion, fine arts and luxury meet this year at Paris Photo, which opened its doors to great expectations at the Grand Palais on Wednesday.

A perfectly staged event that encompasses portraiture, neorealism, war reporting, fantasy, eroticism and, above all, surrealism, since this year marks the centenary of the movement that transformed art and photography.

Debuting in a somber mood, with most creatives openly pessimistic about the US election results and a returning president whose vilification of the LGBTQi+ community has caused widespread alarm. However, there was also a palpable sense of artists, gallery owners and photography fans retreating into the creative world of Paris, as the United States prepares for a highly uncertain future.

With notable sponsors such as Ruinart and BMW with their own specific awards, Paris Photo also included many showcases from luxury brands and editorials. Louis Vuitton managed to combine both elements with a large bookstore on the upper floor featuring its City Guides, from recent examples like Alasdair McLellan photographing the Scottish Highlands to classics like Slim Aarons' visions of la dolce vita in the Italian Riviera.

It was also instructive to note that this edition of Paris Photo featured four galleries from Budapest, the capital of Hungary, which has been ruled as an “illiberal democracy” by its authoritarian prime minister and friend of Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, for more than a decade. .

“Now Americans will be able to see what it's like to live under this kind of regime,” said Tomás Opitz, Venezuelan-Hungarian director of the Tobe gallery in Budapest.

His gallery featured a trio of artists focused on dislocation and movement between various cultures in youth and life. Like Juan Brenner, a Guatemalan photographer who photographed in his youth for Vogue and L'Officiel in New York, whose work now focuses on a personal journey of recovering his origins. The results ranged from portraits of steely youth to This Universe, a haunting analogue image printed with archival pigment ink of a goods train in a remote Scottish valley.

Upstairs, there was a brilliant solo exhibition by Dorottya Vékony at Lontermhandstand, another Hungarian gallery, with semi-nude cut-out female figures in black and white, almost floating inside glass frames. A multidisciplinary artist, he also displayed a giant sculpture of life-size photographs of cut-out human figures, their flesh wrapped around each other, in a headless orgy. Surreal erotica at its most disturbing.

At a time when autocrats exploit Puritanism and attack supposed Western decadence to divide people, John Kayser's remarkable array of nude images from 1960s Los Angeles had a major impact. While working for an aerospace company, he photographed a series of color nudes, which he made more transgressive by placing them next to incongruous objects: tea sets, wooden stools, or stuffed toys.

Works abounded from photographers best known for photographing fashion rather than embracing other disciplines: David LaChapelle's vision of a shark eating a superb pair of legs in a bloody New England sea; or Steven Klein's dreamlike photo of a naked model and a racehorse swimming in the same pool. While Patrick Demarchelier's works ranged from a gelatin silver print of the head of a noble lion to a naked Christy Turlington, with her arms akimbo and a white mouse on her shoulder. A perfect image for any modernist dining room, even if it had a price of $72,500.

Many works proudly noted their magazine origins: Arthur Elgort's supervision of a young Kate Moss gently stroking an elephant's trunk in Nepal confirmed it was for British Vogue. Others, however, hid theirs. Like the In Camera gallery, which neglected to point out that Koto Bolofo's brilliant black-and-white shoot about the youth explosion and dandies of the South African townships in 1997 was filmed for Vogue Hommes International. I should know, since I was the editor-in-chief who commissioned the shoot.

Bolofo is also the subject of an exhibition at Dover Street Market this week in the Marais, as Paris celebrates photography across the capital. While Galerie Dior recently began a tribute to one of fashion's all-time great lensmen, Peter Lindbergh. Unlike Paris Photo, which ends Sunday night, the tribute to Lindbergh will continue until May 4 at the Galerie Dior.

Among the portraits, the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Cologne featured a brilliant selection of Timm Rautert artists such as Gerhard Richter and Olafur Eliasson or the filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. And one had to love Hiroshi Sugimoto's giant self-portrait, standing near a mysterious photo of Mount Fuji, printed on washi paper normally used for origami. You can't help but notice the juxtaposition of the electoral victory of the Republicans (the only leading conservative party in a major democracy led by climate change deniers) and this large image of Mount Fuji. Japan's highest mountain recently enjoyed its first snowfall after the longest period without snow since records began 130 years ago.

It was not necessary to be rich to acquire beautiful photographs. A Louise Dahl-Wolfe photo of Coco Chanel in her Paris apartment was priced at $5,000; while Sid Avery's photo of an innocent Audrey Hepburn on a bicycle carrying her dog Famous at Paramount Studios cost $11,000, both at the Staley Wise gallery. And, although small, only 12 x 8 centimeters, the intriguing black and white images of New York in the middle of a snowstorm were priced between five and ten thousand euros. And photographed by the photographer's photographer, the great Saul Leiter.

Historic images were also available, from a wonderful 1876 shot of the Rialto in Venice, strikingly free at dawn of human figures, taken by Carlo Naya in 1876. Or William Henry Fox Talbot's 1860 image of Notre Dame, surrounded by the past and the now. non-existent buildings.

Given the horrific violence of recent years, war photography was understandably well represented: Robert Capa's reportage of an Israeli government forces ambulance under fire in 1948, the year his state was founded. Plus some hauntingly beautiful color photographs of the 1957 Nevada atomic bomb tests, taken from US Army archives, or Gilles Caron's stark, compelling images of the conflict: The Battle of the Bogside in 1969, or a modern Diamantino silver print of his legendary image of an Ibo fighter, with six rockets in his head, in the Biafran Civil War, Nigeria, from

Finally, this being Paris, there were many book signings; Large stands with rare first edition photography books (from Man Ray to Weegee) and lots of talks, in a section titled 'Conversations'. With the most popular ticket to listen to Jim Jarmusch, the famous independent filmmaker, who is the guest of honor of the entire event.