Rik Gadella, the Carrousel du Louvre and a new room in 2000.

Paris Photo is an annual art fair given over to photography and image-based art, held in Paris every November. English and French Wikipedia both date it to 1997, and French Wikipedia says it was created that year by Rik Gadella, an art publisher, who wanted it to become an international meeting point for historical and contemporary photography in all its forms, from documentary practice to artistic work. The fair’s own history page says the opening edition, at the Carrousel du Louvre, brought together galleries and art publishers from several countries.

French Wikipedia says the fair stayed at the Carrousel du Louvre until 2010. A report by Alex Novak on iPhotoCentral in November 2000 gives a picture of those early years. He wrote that the fair had grown quickly over its four years and that Gadella, then its director, had added a small exhibition room, the Salle Soufflot, between the large halls of the Carrousel. Gadella told him he was planning a website for the fair carrying its whole catalogue, a book on corporate photography collections that grew out of that year’s exhibition and seminar, and a yearly meeting of corporate curators at the fair. The special exhibition that year was built largely around the self-portrait, and Gadella said the following year’s would be a homage to Harry Lunn, the photography dealer whom Novak described as instrumental in getting the show launched.

Ownership changed early. French Wikipedia says the event was bought in 2002 by the exhibitions group RX, which operates in France as RX France, formerly Reed Expositions, and which has organised it ever since; English Wikipedia dates the acquisition by Reed Expositions France to 2001. English Wikipedia lists Gadella as director from 1997 to 2004, followed after a three-year term by Guillaume Piens from 2008 to 2010 and Julien Frydman from 2011 to 2015. Florence Bourgeois is the current director and Anna Planas the artistic director. The fair says its selection committees choose galleries and publishers on the quality and originality of each project, with attention to the diversity of expression and the relevance of the installation proposed.

The Grand Palais from 2011, Los Angeles, New York and a temporary hall.

In 2011 the fair moved to the Grand Palais, the exhibition hall near the Champs-Élysées in the 8th arrondissement of Paris. The fair’s history page says the move came with a public programme of special exhibitions and a conversation series called Platform. In 2012 Paris Photo and the Aperture Foundation set up the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards; English Wikipedia says a preliminary jury in New York chooses a shortlist, the shortlisted books are shown at the fair, and a final jury meets in Paris during the fair.

The name travelled. The fair’s history page says Paris Photo crossed the Atlantic to the Paramount Pictures Studios in Los Angeles for three editions, from 2013 to 2015. The New York Observer reported on 16 December 2014 that Julien Frydman was leaving as director after four years running the fairs in Paris and Los Angeles. The paper wrote that this came a few weeks after the eighteenth Paris edition at the Grand Palais, with the third Los Angeles edition due from 1 to 3 May 2015.

Curated sectors followed. The fair says Prismes, from 2015, gave room to large formats, series and installation works, and that Curiosa, introduced in 2018, began with a thematic project on erotic photography; in 2019 the curator Osei Bonsu turned Curiosa towards emerging artists. The Guardian marked the 22nd edition, held at the Grand Palais from 8 to 11 November 2018, with a gallery of works brought by exhibitors, among them pictures by Harry Callahan, Daido Moriyama, Masahisa Fukase and Sibylle Bergemann.

A New York edition was planned for the spring of 2020. AnOther reported on 27 April 2020 that Paris Photo New York, the fair’s inaugural edition in the United States, due to be held at Pier 94, had been postponed because of Covid-19, and that the organisers had moved it to an online viewing room, open until 30 April. In Paris the fair moved too. With the Grand Palais closed for renovation, Paris Photo was held from 2021 to 2023 in the Grand Palais Éphémère, a temporary hall that French Wikipedia places near the Eiffel Tower; the 2023 edition ran there from 9 to 12 November. French Wikipedia also says that in 2022 RX won the tender held by the Réunion des musées nationaux – Grand Palais for the hall’s autumn dates.

A fair named for its city, set in a sequence of Paris halls.

Photography festivals, fairs and centres face a design problem that many other cultural institutions do not: the work they show is itself made of images, and any poster, banner or cover has to decide how much room to give them. One approach lets the photograph do the talking, with a single picture filling a poster or a catalogue cover and the institution’s name kept small, set in a plain sans along one edge. The other builds a neutral frame, a fixed grid, a strong colour or a typographic block, that stays the same year after year while the pictures inside it change with each exhibition. Many organisations use both, keeping the frame for the institution and giving the image the space on anything that announces a particular show. Inside the galleries the same choice reaches the walls, where vinyl titles, wall texts and caption labels are usually quiet so that they sit beside a print without competing with it.

Much of the identity is also carried in print. Exhibition catalogues and photobooks are often designed with a different publisher or designer each time, so the house style may shrink to a spine, a logo on the back cover and a consistent credit line. Fairs add another setting: rows of booths in a large hall, where the organiser’s signage, floor plans and lanyards have to stay readable next to dozens of galleries with marks of their own. Festivals that spread across a city work at street level, with flags, maps, numbered venues and arrows that guide visitors along a trail of borrowed rooms, churches, shops and courtyards, and a system that holds together across many venues at once.

Back at the Grand Palais in 2024, and a fair arranged in sectors.

The fair returned to the Grand Palais for its 27th edition, from 7 to 10 November 2024. Its announcement for that edition, published on e-flux, described curated paths through the hall: one chosen by the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch for the centenary of Surrealism, and Elles x Paris Photo, on women photographers, curated by Raphaëlle Stopin. The same announcement listed a tribute to Robert Frank, talks by artists about their books, and an exhibition of Lithuanian photography curated by Sonia Voss for the Lithuania Season in France. French Wikipedia says the fair created a space for digital art in 2023, and that the 2025 edition was held at the Grand Palais from 13 to 16 November. The fair’s own site gives the 2026 dates as 12 to 15 November, again at the Grand Palais.

The fair is now organised in sectors. English Wikipedia lists among them Voices, Digital, Emergence and a book sector, next to the main gallery sector, and says each edition opens with an invitation-only vernissage on the Wednesday, followed by public days from Thursday to Sunday. The book sector brings photobook publishers into the same hall as the galleries, and the fair’s announcement for 2024 counted artist signings in the publishing sector across all four days.

For a design guide, Paris Photo shows a fair whose image has been set by the rooms it fills: the halls beneath the Louvre, the Grand Palais near the Champs-Élysées, and a temporary hall near the Eiffel Tower used for three Novembers while the Grand Palais was restored. Compare the Art Basel and Aperture guides. For this guide we use nave iron, gallery white, silver gelatin and safelight red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Paris Photo’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.