All eyes on Paris Photo 2025 – focus on our highlights

There's much to see – and to covet – at Paris Photo 2025 (13-16 November), the 28th edition of the event, which is back at the Grand Palais for the second year in a row. It's hosting 179 galleries from 33 countries and a rich programme that encompasses photography in all its forms, from silver gelatin to blockchain. Artistic director Anna Planas says, ‘We want to embrace the entire history of photography, from the 19th century to the most contemporary works, and to show the diversity of the medium.’

The world's most important international photography fair, Paris Photo brings together big-name galleries and smaller ones, iconic photographers and emerging artists. If you're looking for gems by Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott, Lee Friedlander, Irving Penn, Seydou Keïta, William Klein, Weegee, Sally Mann, Sebastião Salgado or Hiroshi Sugimoto, you've come to the right place.

But you'll also find lesser-known surprises, such as Marine Lanier, one of the artists in the ‘Emergence’ sector of the fair and winner of the Prix Maison Ruinart for an enchanting series called Alchimia, shot in the fields and skies of the Champagne region.

In addition to art for sale, the fair offers conversations, performances and book signings from the likes of Todd Hido and Wolfgang Tillmans. And ‘The Last Photo’ is an exhibition of works from the collection of Estrellita B Brodsky, one of the most important private collections of Latin American photography.

All of this edition's curators are women, though Planas says this was not intentional. What was deliberate is an ongoing increase in the number of female artists on display, from 20 per cent in 2018 to nearly double that percentage this year.

Upon entering, visitors come face to face with the Poggi gallery's powerful installation by Sophie Ristelhueber, the French photographer who won the prestigious Hasselblad Award in 2025. A wall nearly 40m long displays works from throughout her career, revealing the scars that war and other disasters have left on landscapes, cities and human bodies.

Steps away, at Klemm's Berlin, Truth Table, by Adrian Sauer, is a project about digital manipulation, consisting of different images (a smiley face, a palm tree, an Eiffel Tower) made up of millions of coloured pixels in various combinations.

Thierry Bigaignon has an actual darkroom on his stand, complete with a photographer: Renato D'Agostin. When a collector acquires one of his silver gelatin prints, they can meet D'Agostin, who will reprint it on the spot, to show how the development process works. Setting up his chemicals before the fair opened, the Italian photographer laughed, ‘It's going to be strange, I feel like an animal in a cage.’

Vermelho from São Paulo presents Brazil's Claudia Andujar, who has reworked her 1975 archives, attaching a yellow acrylic panel to a photo of the Volkswagen that she drove to the Venezuelan border for her work covering the Yanomami people. Rosegallery, from Santa Monica, has come back to Paris Photo after an absence of a few years with a solo show by Mexican artist Tania Franco Klein (who is also currently part of MoMA's New Photography exhibition).

Magnum Gallery is featuring vintage prints by several of its stars, including Philippe Halsman's 1948 portrait of a floating Salvador Dalí and three cats. Galerie Nathalie has Un feu by Luc Delahaye (formerly of Magnum), a photo of migrants standing around a fire, also part of Delahaye's solo show now running at the Jeu de Paume museum. Fraenkel presents a new work by artist/sound composer Christian Marclay, a grid of vinyl record sleeves and covers. Martin Parr's French-fry-eating seagull from 1996 graces the stand of Clémentine de la Feronnière. And at Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve's stand, Juergen Teller is drinking a beer while standing naked on his father's grave.

But not everything is profane. Galerie Binome is presenting dark, ghostly images from Laurence Aëgerter's series on French cathedrals and churches. Aëgerter screen-printed them with thermo-chronic ink, which undergoes a chemical reaction when sunlight hits it, revealing the image underneath. Gallery director Valérie Cazin says, ‘When this happens, the revelation is so magnificent and surprising that the spectator can only observe. It's the same magic as when an image is revealed in a darkroom. In a society where we are all hyperactive, it provokes a moment of meditation.’

The ‘Voices’ sector of the fair features two guest curators. One, Devika Singh, says she approached the theme of landscapes in different ways, ‘from documentary perspectives to more speculative and personal takes’. Works include French painter/photographer Bernard Guillot's atmospheric photos of Cairo's City of the Dead, as well as Indian photographer Gauri Gill's The Village on the Highway, a quietly political statement set against a backdrop of plastic tarpaulins.

This is the third year that the fair has a dedicated ‘Digital’ sector, curated by Nina Roehrs. It includes an installation by conceptual artist Cole Sternberg for Giga – a partnership between Unicef and the International Telecommunication Union to address digital inequalities among the world's children. Called A Garden, the project is a large cube upon which a million images of generative artwork are projected, representing a network of interconnected schools.

In a rather different vein, the digital platform TAEX is showing the Irish artist Kevin Abosch, who trains AI systems with his own images, then ‘sculpts’ them into a kind of synthetic photography. The results can be creepy, such as a white cockatoo emerging from a high-tech apparatus. Two centuries after the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce turned a camera image into the first permanent photograph, Paris Photo is still exploring what defines the art form.

Paris Photo 2025 runs 13-16 November