Nothing that moved left a trace. In 1838, Louis Daguerre aimed his camera at the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, and the exposure lasted several minutes. Carriages, pedestrians and the rest of the street vanished from the plate. Only two men stayed behind: one with a foot raised, and another polishing a shoe. Nearly two centuries later, paris photo 2026 returns to Paris with the same question at its core: what gets kept?
That image was made just over a decade after Nicéphore Niépce captured View from the Window at Le Gras, dated to around 1826 or 1827. In 2026, France marks 200 years since the invention of photography. The 29th edition of paris photo 2026 returns to the Grand Palais from 12 to 15 November, with 246 exhibitors from 38 countries.
The Boulevard du Temple plate shows how the city itself shaped what the camera could record. For more on how Paris was remade for street life, read Haussmann’s Paris and the rise of modern urban spectatorship, which traces the boulevards and the flâneurs who walked them.
The medium is pulling in two directions. Some work shows images no camera ever recorded. Other work returns to silver, paper and chemistry, the materials Daguerre and his contemporaries used. Visitors will often find both in the same room.
Start at the entrance to paris photo 2026
A 36-meter retrospective of Thomas Ruff’s work lines the entrance to the fair. Conceived as an “open book”, it covers more than 40 years, moving from analogue photographs to digital simulations.
On Thursday 12 November at 2pm, Ruff joins Florian Ebner, head of the photography department at the Centre Pompidou, for a talk on his practice.
The bicentenary is most literal further in. Hans P Kraus Jr shows works by Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot. Alongside them are cyanotypes by Anna Atkins, made of British algae and bound into volumes from 1843. Those books are generally counted as the first photobook, a year before Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature.
Women at the center of the history
Atkins also shows how narrowly photography’s history has been told. That point frames the ‘Elles x Paris Photo’ path, curated this year by Aldeide Delgado, founder of the Women Photographers International Archive. The path is produced with the French Ministry of Culture and sits inside the fair.
Since the path launched in 2018, the share of women artists at this photography fair has nearly doubled, from 20 to 38 percent. Delgado’s selection, ‘An Oceanic Beginning’, starts from the ocean. It retells photography’s history without a fixed center.
One selected work is Ous de granota (2025) by Alba Yruela. The photograph shows frogspawn suspended in murky water, each egg a dark pupil looking back at the viewer. Yruela makes her Paris Photo debut with Barcelona gallery Chiquita Room, in the Emergence sector.
Elle Pérez, who has a solo presentation at Public Relations, is also in Delgado’s selection. Pérez works across photography, collage and film. On Friday 13 November, Pérez joins writer and curator Gem Fletcher for a conversation co-presented by Aperture and Fletcher’s podcast, The Messy Truth. The session takes its title from a question: what is the work of photography today?
Digital images and the feelings they are built to create
Marco De Mutiis of Fotomuseum Winterthur is the new curator of the Digital sector. He argues that viewers no longer see through optics alone. They see through layers of Photoshop, social media aesthetics, facial recognition and memes.
De Mutiis also wrote an essay for ‘Soft Photography’, a research project at ECAL, the Lausanne art and design school. The project was led by the late Milo Keller, the school’s head of photography. It also forms part of this year’s educational program at the fair.
The project asks what images are designed to do to viewers. Its subjects range from rage-bait, content built to provoke anger, to ASMR, or autonomous sensory meridian response, the tingling sensation some people feel from certain sounds and visuals. Rather than asking whether an AI-generated image looks real, it asks what the image is meant to make us feel. De Mutiis discusses the project with the artist Charlie Engman on Thursday 12 November at 5pm.
Books, from the Seine to Los Angeles
Friday 13 November is devoted to books. At 3pm, the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards are announced at the fair. At 6pm, Palm* Studios launches a first look at a larger archive of beach pictures by the California-based photographer Molly Matalon, titled Lil Big Beach Book.
The week’s most unusual book venue floats on the Seine. The photobook fair Polycopies opens on the Concorde-Atlantique boat at Port de Solférino from 1pm on Wednesday 11 November. It began in 2014 with around 35 publishers. It now hosts nearly 100 publishers and booksellers, spread across the boat and the quay beside it.
Among the tables is Ciao Press, the Swiss imprint Nicolas Polli founded at the end of 2017. Polli calls it a ‘publishing playground’. He often works as photographer, designer and publisher on the same title. He last showed at Paris Photo in 2022.
Polli’s launch this year is Rays of Light – Reflected Realities by Dominique Teufen, made with Éditions Images Vevey. The book uses a reflective silver surface to turn fragments of urban landscapes into something closer to painting. No digital manipulation is involved. Polli’s advice for visitors is simple: arrive as soon as the doors open. His Polycopies picks include Skinnerboox, Yogurt Editions, Fraglich Publishing and Deadbeat Club. Deadbeat Club, based in Los Angeles, makes its Paris Photo debut this year with work by Daniel Dorsa, Cole Barash and Taylor Galloway.
Across the city
The bicentenary also spreads beyond the fairgrounds. Now in its seventh edition, Photo Days brings exhibitions to venues across Paris throughout November, running alongside paris photo 2026. At the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, the Studio presents Nanténé Traoré’s ‘pays des merveilles’, the artist’s first solo show in a museum. The photographs were shot in Brittany on expired film from the 1990s.
Paris photography extends well beyond the fairgrounds, and the city’s light has drawn photographers for generations. Alix Urien’s modern Paris seen through Impressionist light offers a contemporary take on the same streets worth seeing alongside these exhibitions.
At the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, ‘Nicaragua, Histoire, Mémoire’ traces Susan Meiselas’s photographs of the 1978-79 revolution. Her images later appeared on T-shirts, stamps, matchboxes and murals. Some of those uses celebrated the revolution, and others contested it. At the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s François-Mitterrand site, ‘Photographies japonaises’ draws on one of the first Western collections of postwar Japanese photography, begun in the late 1960s. The display includes around 250 prints and 50 rare books, plus a section on Japanese photographers who looked at Paris.
After hours
Much of paris photo 2026 happens after dark, at openings, launches and bookshop events. On Thursday 12 November at 6pm, ECAL opens ‘Soft Photography’ at Espace Commines. The show runs for only two days. Among the student works is Min Dai’s Rate My Cake, which renders a mouth in glossy orange, with sweetness pushed until it turns repellent.
From 7pm, Francesca Allen launches ‘Hair’ at Cahier Central, her second volume on the meaning of long hair. The first was shot in Lithuania at a contest for the world’s longest hair and shown at Paris Photo last year with Chloé Arts. This time Allen follows 26 women who gathered in Las Vegas to compete for the first Miss Rapunzel title. She photographs them away from the stage, with their hair spilling across hotel beds and through the casinos.
Later, the night moves to La Montgolfière in the tenth arrondissement. Dans le Bain opens its first show, ‘Wild Ember Orchestra’, open until 11pm. Co-created with the independent imprint Pomegranate Press, it is a transatlantic exchange between American and French artists, including Myles Loftin and Sarah Balhadère.
Voices and what disappears
By Sunday 15 November, the ‘Voices’ sector offers a clear point of return. Curated by Zasha Colah and Francesco Zanot, it takes disappearance as its theme. The works include photographs made to fade or destroy themselves. They also include AI images that look like photographs but no longer record anything.
The theme echoes the Boulevard du Temple plate. Only two men survived the 1838 exposure because they stood still. Today, images are produced faster than anyone can view them. The question is no longer which figures remain visible, but which images anyone will take the time to see.
Daguerre needed two men to stand still for a few minutes. Four days at the Grand Palais and across Paris ask how many images, in an age of endless production, will ever be given that kind of attention.
Via wallpaper.com
Frequently asked questions
When and where is Paris Photo 2026 taking place?
The 29th edition of Paris Photo 2026 returns to the Grand Palais from 12 to 15 November. The fair features 246 exhibitors from 38 countries.
What is the Elles x Paris Photo path?
Elles x Paris Photo is a path inside the fair, curated this year by Aldeide Delgado, founder of the Women Photographers International Archive. It is produced with the French Ministry of Culture, and its selection is titled ‘An Oceanic Beginning’.
Why is Anna Atkins’s work mentioned in the Paris Photo article?
Anna Atkins’s cyanotypes of British algae, bound into volumes from 1843, are generally counted as the first photobook. The article notes this came a year before Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature.
Where is the Polycopies photobook fair held?
The Polycopies photobook fair opens on the Concorde-Atlantique boat at Port de Solférino, on the Seine, from 1pm on Wednesday 11 November. It began in 2014 with around 35 publishers and now hosts nearly 100 publishers and booksellers.
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