With festivals, concerts and fairs shutting down on a massive scale, it is comforting to see alternatives and solutions are emerging everywhere you look. Take Paris Photo for example, the world’s largest international art fair dedicated to photography, which was forced to cancel its inaugural edition in New York due to the coronavirus. While devastating for the artists and galleries involved, the organisation quickly decided to help support its exhibitors by launching an Online Viewing Room. Open to the public from 24-30 April, the online catalogue will showcase 173 galleries and publishers, and make 1200 photographic works available to photography fans across the world. Browsing through its endless pages is basically like a virtual road trip across a very aesthetically pleasing landscape.
Highlights include the work of some i-D favourites — from old masters like Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin, to emerging names like Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Tyler Mitchell, among many, many others. The viewing room meanders through some very relevant and urgent themes — take Dorothea Lange’s photo of ripped stockings during the Great Depression for example, a stark historical reminder of economic hardship that we might be facing ourselves. Or Paul Cupido’s work Hands Together, which offers an optimistic message of hope and perseverance.
Collectors will of course be able to contact participating galleries for sale inquiries, but to be honest, we’re mostly here to window-shop.
Visit the Online Viewing Room here.
Dorothea Lange, Mended Stockings, San Francisco, 1934. Courtesy of the Edwynn Houk Gallery
Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Darkroom Mirror Study (0X5A1563), 2017. Courtesy of Aperture Foundation