In 2018, photographer Antoni Campana’s family found several red boxes hidden in his garage containing nearly 5,000 images of the Spanish Civil War. Born in the Arbucies in 1905, the Catalan artist has received several awards for his work but for decades concealed the glass plates, copies and negatives he made in Barcelona between 1935-40. Featuring scenes from everyday life including Republican youths parading on the Diagonal in 1936 and Third Reich soldiers at the same site in 1939, some of these images have been used by Republicans from the start. After Franco came to power, Campana didn’t want to provide propaganda for the other side, or knew it would be too dangerous for him to share.
The work is now on display at Paris Photo (until November 13) in Barcelona-based Galeria RocioSantaCruz’s booth. Founded in 1997, Paris Photo is the most prestigious international art exhibition devoted to photography; 25 years later, some interesting questions arise for the fast-growing media. One gallery said that there were very few 19th-century prints at this year’s exhibition, speculating this was because collectors and the museum had bought them all. New inventions like Campana’s red box only appear occasionally and meanwhile on Curiosa, the section devoted to new photographers, few contemporary artists are as comfortable on screen as they are in print.
Suburban hauntology by Arash Hanaei and Morad Montazami
Take Suburban hauntology, an installation by artist Arash Hanaei and curator Morad Montazami. Corresponding to the utopian architecture of the 1960s-70s and the metaverse, it is a “hybrid and immersive installation” that includes digital images, a hologram, two videos and a virtual game of chess between Mark Zuckerberg and the late British radical philosopher Mark Fischer. Hanaei and Montazami are the first duo to win the BMW Art Makers program, which supports emerging artists and curators experimenting with contemporary image creation and installation — work that, perhaps, isn’t easily sold as prints. One of the questions Hanaei and Montazami’s work raises is what it means to live in the 21st century, with high-resolution screens and the internet.
Galerie Number 8 suggests a different twist. The gallery is “online based”, says founder Marie Gomis-Trezise, although it appears at art exhibitions such as Paris Photo. It represents a “globally diverse roster of emerging artists in photography and mixed media”, and features prints by David Uzochukwu. A fast-growing Austrian-Nigerian photographer, Uzochukwu built an online community and was included in shows Flickr, 20 Under 20 in 2014, curated by Mode photo director Ivan Shaw at Milk Studios, New York. His work will soon be exhibited at the respected Rencontres de Bamako in Mali in December, including in an expansive touring exhibition New Front Black Frontand also featured in the catalog for In Fantastic Black, Ekow Eshun’s must-see exhibition at the Hayward Gallery this summer. Uzochukwu is still 23 years old.
In the case of Galerie Number 8, digital distribution shows the ways in which the internet can open up access to a wider canon of artists. Back to the main exhibition, a new proposition called Fellowship is “fighting for the future of photography” by selling NFTs along with prints. The Fellowship’s advisory board includes Darius Himes, head of international photography at Christie’s, and his roster includes big names, including August Sander and Guy Bourdin, both of whose work was featured at the exhibition. It also represents Magnum Photos members Christopher Anderson, Jim Goldberg, and Cristina de Middel. The Fellowship supports new image makers as well, and at Paris Photo it also presents the series of Omani-Bahranian visual artist Eman Ali The Earth Will Die If The Sun Stops Kissing It (2022).
Alfredo Jaar Gold in the Morning of AI (ten lightbox set) (1985). Courtesy of artist and gallery Goodman
But perhaps screens are a distraction, as photography has always been a nebulous medium with a lot of life outside of art prints. The Goodman Gallery exhibits works by Alfredo Jaar Gold in the Morning, for example, a series of images taken at the Serra Pelada open pit mine in Brazil in 1985; Jaar originally took over all the billboards in New York’s Spring Street subway station to show the work, pairing the image with contemporary gold prices to bring commuters—many of them on their way to Wall Street—facing face to face with the precarious lives of the miners. . Retrieving them from the underground, Jaar displays these images as a series of lightboxes as references to the glossy world of advertising.
William Henry Fox Talbot’s Piece of Fruit (1845)
And in the end, photography is always a new medium. New York Gallery Hans P Kraus Jr. Inc. exhibits an 1846 salt mold by William Henry Fox Talbot Piece of Fruit (1845) in Paris, the final illustration for his groundbreaking publication The Pencil of Nature, which first illustrated the potential of the new medium of photography. Nearly two centuries later, it’s still hard to see, perhaps even more so, to see the once-exotic pineapple still so perfectly preserved on paper.
