FACELESS IN PARIS

Apparently the average person is 38% more likely to like an Instagram post in it features a face that if it doesn't. But my readers are more sophisticated than that. So the following choices - from over 200 galleries and publishers and over 2000 artists at Paris Photo 2018 - includes no faces, not even of animals or masks, but plenty of flowers, legs and new approaches to taking and making photographs.

 

Richard Learoyd: Live and Dead Poppies, 2018 at Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York 

 

Richard Learoyd is known for using a room as a camera obscura within which the photographic paper is exposed to produce an entirely grainless, larger than life image with no interposing negative. The subject in the adjacent room, separated by a lens, is most often a person, but he showed only flowers at Paris Photo. On Remembrance Weekend, it seems appropriate to begin with this wiltingly beautiful mixture of the living and the dead. 

        

Sayouki Inoue: I can't recall my first light, 2018 - NAP, Tokyo

Carrying on with death and birth... Seeing how uncomprehending the eyes of her dying grandfather were, Sayouki Inoue was inspired  to search out the parallel at the other end of life's span: she worked with a birthing centre in Tokyo, so that she could photograph the first five minutes of 20 babies, hot-footing it to the facility as soon as she got the call that a collaborating mother was about to deliver. Here she is holding up a photograph of her grandfather's eyes in front of  those of babies who have just opened theirs for the first time.

Jo Ann Callis Legs on Dresser (ca. 1976-1977) at Rose Gallery, Santa Monica 

This particular set of upended legs appears to be enjoying a post-coital cigarette: it has the wit typical of Jo Ann Collis' varied work over 50 years which is well caught by the gallery's description as reinterpreting reality by 'inserting pleasure and tension into the everyday'. It's one of her early constructed scenes from the series 'Other Rooms', which she has only recently shown publicly.

        

Adam Fuss - Untitled, 2018 at Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco 

How many new methods can there be left for photographing flowers?  Adam Fuss showed a block of nine plants which he 'fractured' (his term)  by placing them into an etching press before scanning the result. Their juices bleed like water, and a new combination of violence and beauty arises to recharge the age-old use of flowers to suggest the transience of life in the face of death.

                       


Mona Kuhn: Succulents 09 and Bushes 30, 2018 at Flowers, London  

Mona Kuhn's new 'modular series' can be shown in various combinations of two image types: the artfully blurred succulents are decidedly more vaginal than the mid-sections of female nudes - their explicitness reduced by pubic bushes (coming back into fashion, Mona told me) and use of solarisation. Kuhn, who sees the series as a tribute to the woman artists once overshadowed by men, emphasises that Lee Miller discovered the technique made famous by her then-lover, Man Ray. 

Peter Funch: The Imperfect Atlas at V1, Copenhagen  

Peter Funch's latest series conjures a three-way time slip: he has taken vintage postcards of America's Northern Cascade mountain range, which themselves evoked the landscapes painted by the Hudson River School, and returned to the same place to reshoot the views - using the techniques of early colour photography so that they look pre-aged. Thus we look through the consistent effect of our technological impact on how the landscape looks to see  what actual impact - such as glacial reduction - we have had on it.

Alan Ruppersberg: My Secret Life III (Purple, green, orange, blue), 2018 at Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Santa Monica

Alan Ruppersberg has often used the colour fades characteristic of many Colby posters (omnipresent in LA during 1948-2012, when the company operated) as the backdrop for his playfully puzzling texts. So he refers to that as part of this self-portrait, in which everything above his waist is hidden in the unfurled roll at the bottom. What it shows is a secret which can only be revealed by purchasing and - potentially - undermining the teasing point of the work.

Axel Hütte: Altenburg, Bibliothek, 2017 at Galerie Nikolaus Ruzicska, Salzburg


Axel Hütte is perhaps the most innovative technician among the famous photographers of the Düsseldorf School. He has recently developed the 'glass print', which proves especially suited to 'Imperial', his set of grand Hapsburg interiors from Vienna and surrounds. We see the front of a pane of glass, on the back of which Hütte has printed the image, and a little way behind which lies polished stainless steel. The haunting luminescence caused is subtly different from more straightforward uses of metal, glass or mirror in presenting photographs.

Dorothea Lange: Cable Car, San Francisco, 1956 at Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York / Zurich

Historic work is a significant presence at Paris Photo. The touring Dorothea Lange retrospective is currently at the Jeu de Paume, and - consequently, perhaps - her uber-famous image of a migrant mother was a little too common at the fair. This radically cropped view - in which we don't see a high proportion of any of the several subjects - was a more refreshing sighting. It reminds us that after the depression years Lange continued to document California: she lived in Berkeley from 1918 to her death in 1965.

Lisa Sartorio Here or Elsewhere: Untitled  (War in Chechnya), 2018 - Galerie Binome, Paris 

Ending as we began, with remembering conflict: to counter the numbing and distancing effect of the flood of images online, Lisa Sartorio selected those showing damage from wars occurring within her own lifetime, printed them in black-and-white (to maximise the contrasts) onto Japanese tissue paper and set about teasing the paper so that the initial impact of explosions, fire and smoke was brought back to the scene (Syria with her above, Chechnya below).