Paris Photo's digital sector asks what 'soft photography' means

Paris Photo's 29th edition runs at the Grand Palais until 15 November, and its digital sector — twelve exhibitors, curated for the first time by Marco De Mutiis of Fotomuseum Winterthur — arrives two weeks after an abbreviated edition of Art Basel Paris. De Mutiis takes over from Nina Roehrs, who helmed the first three editions of the sector.

Alongside the stands sits a pedagogical programme titled Soft Photography, organised by the École Cantonale d'Art de Lausanne (ECAL) in Switzerland. Spanning an interactive exhibition and talks, it contextualises the place of AI and CGI (computer-generated imagery) within photography — aiming, in the fair's framing, at much-needed dialogue between the medium's analogue and digital wings.

What does the digital sector actually contain?

AI imagery is present, including New York's Heft Gallery showing Alkan Avcıoğlu's Disreality series, which expands the surreal landscape aesthetic he first introduced in a collaboration with Edward Burtynsky. But the sector also contains plenty of analogue images, even photograms (cameraless prints made by exposing objects directly on light-sensitive paper) — enough to raise the question of how separate a section this really needs to be. A similar dynamic played out in the Zero 10 sector of Art Basel in Basel last June, where the term "digital art" was applied so broadly it begged the same question.

Noteworthy stands include:

• Carmen Araujo Arte (Venezuela): Alejandro Cartagena's mosaic-cut collages, built from found photographs as a manual interpretation of how generative AI assembles found pixels — works that ask timely questions about authorship.
• Palo Gallery: Adrea Orejarena and Caleb Stein's American Glitch series, interrogating simulation theory and screen-filled reality. The highlight is Glitch Typologies (2020-24), a seven-channel sequence of floating images projected inside a 3m-by-3m glass cube, with projectors hanging on a central rod like CCTV cameras.
• Licheng Ling Projects: Yumo Wu's solo stand, mixing AI and darkroom analogue manipulation so that technique becomes secondary to the image's abstract textures. It marks Wu's first solo presentation in Europe, and one of her images features in Paris Photo's selection marking the bicentennial of photography's invention.
• Au Cube: Vincent Fournier's Flora Incognita, large-scale portraits of speculative flowers modelled with Houdini software, each in a wooden frame with a golden botanical plaque — evoking 18th- and 19th-century botanical illustration.
• Nguyen-Wahed (New York): Summer Wagner's unframed, romantic, grainy large-scale photographs, digital only insofar as they were shot on a digital camera. Wagner describes the work's subject as our relationship with reality — "we've collectively succumbed to the tsunami or cultural and technological changes that have thrown image-making into an existential crisis", she said.

Facing the digital sector, Ruttkowski 68 presents François Hallard's large-scale Polaroid prints of flowers, titled "Conversations avec Claude". On the second preview day, Hallard added "(Monet) not IA" in bold letters after countless visitors presumed an AI connection — Anthropic's AI engine, it seems, has eclipsed Monet's claim to the first name Claude.

What do we call this now?

The naming problem runs through the whole fair. The dealer Howard Greenberg told our correspondent several years ago that he favours "lens-based" to separate camera work from computer-generated images. That term may no longer hold: artists now routinely use lenses, enlargers and other analogue tools to human-wash digital imagery, blurring the line between an image taken with a camera and one generated with a computer. "Synthetic photography" has a nice ring, the source notes, though it suggests latex and carcinogenic sunscreen. For the moment, "soft photography" may be the best fit.

The sector and its accompanying programming quietly tackle the discipline's ongoing existential crisis by demonstrating that digital art predates many of the technologies now under debate — and that its applications in contemporary photography are legion. Whether a separate digital section still earns its label may be the question the 30th edition has to answer.