Celebrating two hundred years of photography means looking at its earliest images while asking what we understand a photograph to be today.
Paris Photo will make this relationship between history and transformation a central theme of its 29th edition, taking place from November 12 to 15, 2026, at the Grand Palais in Paris.
The fair will bring together historical works, contemporary projects, photobooks and digital experiments in a programme marking the medium’s bicentenary.
This edition draws its interest from the connections it proposes between practices separated by decades. Early photographic processes will share space with works exploring the image’s material qualities, uses and relationship with technology. Together, they raise enduring questions: what does a photograph preserve, how does it construct a representation, and what happens when the means of making it change?
From Early Processes to Thomas Ruff
In the Main sector, historical photography will feature through galleries including Hans P. Kraus Jr., presenting works by pioneers such as Daguerre, William Henry Fox Talbot and Anna Atkins. Other presentations will approach this legacy from a contemporary perspective, including Isabelle Le Minh’s investigations into photography’s history and boundaries.
Thomas Ruff will take a prominent place with an installation spanning more than forty years of work. His practice offers a particularly relevant perspective for this edition: from analogue photography to digital simulations, he has explored how tools and contexts alter what we see and recognize as a photographic image.
The presentations will also make room for social and personal histories. Merry Alpern’s Dirty Windows and Miguel Ángel Rojas’s photographs made in Bogotá cinemas during the 1970s will introduce questions about intimacy, observation and spaces of encounter.
The Image Between Memory and Disappearance
Curated by Francesco Zanot and Zasha Colah, the Voices sector will focus on disappearance. Its premise introduces a significant tension: a medium associated with preserving memories and recording existence is undergoing its own transformation.
Digital, curated by Marco de Mutiis, will examine how technology changes the production and perception of images. Meanwhile, Emergence will present monographic projects by a new generation of artists, extending the fair’s scope to practices finding their place on the international scene.
These sectors offer different ways of approaching the bicentenary: through the persistence of images, the fragility of their supports and the possibilities that emerge as their tools evolve.
Collections, Books and New Perspectives
The Centre Pompidou will add an institutional perspective with Revealing, a presentation of around one hundred works by nearly thirty historical and contemporary artists. The exhibition will explore photography’s transformations through three themes: Making the Image, To Infinity and Identities. Curated by Aldeide Delgado, Elles × Paris Photo will also highlight women artists represented at the fair. Official programme
Photobooks will retain a central role through the Book sector, conversations with authors and publishers, signing sessions and the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards. Their presence underscores how photography also develops through sequencing, relationships between pages and the editorial decisions that turn a collection of images into a publication.
Paris Photo 2026 brings together different ways of making, presenting and understanding photographs. The bicentenary provides the starting point; the works and the relationships between them offer an opportunity to consider where the medium goes next.
