Pace Gallery charts photography’s span at Paris Photo 2026
The gallery presents a carefully considered selection of contemporary and historical photographic practices at the Grand Palais, spanning from Irving Penn's 1949 portraiture to emerging voices shaping the medium today.
AI-assisted voice playback. Starts only when you choose Play.
Pace Gallery’s presentation at Paris Photo 2026 moves beyond the gallery’s roster to chart a broader conversation within photography itself, one that respects both the foundational language of the medium and its radical contemporary evolutions. The selection navigates decades of visual inquiry with the precision of a curator who understands that photography’s power lies not in technological progress but in the photographer’s singular vision.
Irving Penn’s velvet helmet study from 1949, photographed in New York with the photographer’s characteristic stillness and formal clarity, sits alongside work by Richard Learoyd, whose 2026 photograph “Eye” continues the tradition of intimate optical inquiry. Between them flows the work of artists whose practices reshape what photography can address: Kiki Smith’s botanical study from 2007, rendered with painterly attention to colour and form; Richard Misrach’s “Cosmic Sea #11” from December 2022, capturing light and atmosphere with the precision of empirical observation; Yto Barrada’s “Holes in the Moon” series from 2024; and RaMell Ross’s moving image work spanning 2012 to 2026.
Robert Frank’s untitled photograph from 1947 anchors the presentation in the vocabulary of American street photography, its grain and geometry asserting photography’s essential language. The gallery’s approach honours this lineage while creating space for artists who use the medium to explore form, colour, narrative and time in ways that would have seemed impossible to earlier practitioners.
Pace Gallery occupies booth C23 at the Grand Palais during Paris Photo 2026, November 12 through 15.
Imagery courtesy of Pace Gallery (@pacegallery).
