Robert Longo, “Untitled ( Men in the Cities )”, 1976-1982. Courtesy in camera galerie.
It was hard to miss Paris Photo at Grand Palais last week: with 143 galleries, 26 publishers and just under 60,000 guests, the 2014 edition exceeded crowd-size expectations set in the past years. Mastermind Julien Frydman, formerly of Magnum Photo and the Ministry of Culture, stepped away from the hullaballoo to chat about the past, present and future of photography.
Tell me how you became director of the fair – your background is quite interesting because you didn’t come from a strictly photography background.
Before becoming director of Magnum, I was in charge of special projects at Magnum, and before that I worked in communications industry and new media. I also was a former advisor of the French Ministry of Culture. In this kind of environment–the cabinet or the advertising agency or the Magnum agency–you are confronted with a number of different proposals, and you are always in relations with the business side and the artistic side. I guess that in that position, you need to be able to deal with both and respect both cultures and approaches.
Why did you decide to change the location of Paris Photo from the Carrousel du Louvre to the Grand Palais?
I think it was because it had become somehow boring. I thought that it was very narrow and limited in terms of what photography was, so I knew that coming to the standards of photography would be higher at the Grand Palais, and that it would give me multiple points of leverage: leverage in photography, opening the box, ensuring that important artists and new practices and multiple aspects of the media would be presented at the fair. It would really become something different.
Robert Mapplethorpe, “Ariel Phillips”, 1979. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used with permission.
You also launched Paris Photo in Los Angeles. Why was it L.A. that you chose and not, for instance, New York?
There was so much success here for 18 years: you can talk to the galleries and talk to the collectors, why should you wait for another year? Obviously, the event needed to be in Spring to ensure there is enough time between the two fairs. If we had chosen New York, which would have been an easy choice, it would have looked toward Europe and the U.S. There are so many other fairs at that time of the year happening in New York, it would have pushed us back into the photo corner. We wanted to make sure that we were building the future, adding something.
Having multiple institutions and galleries on the West Coast showing artistic work from the Fifties to the Eighties or the Forties to the Eighties, it was really the area reclaiming its own background in art history. I was amazed by what I saw there: the energy, the caricature that I was nourishing in Los Angeles, which I knew, but maybe my perception was a little old fashioned. I realised there was so much energy–such a creative instinct – that my own instinct was that this was where I saw the fair happening. It is an environment so linked to image making and questioning image, and things that I wanted to do. It also is halfway between Asia and Latin America.
Massimo Vitali, “Lampeduse #4659”, 2012. Courtesy of Benrubi Gallery.
Do you think that there is now a split between photography and fine art?
There artists who are photographers. There are artists who use photography in the sense that they use photography as a medium and that is it. There are artists that use various forms. There are artists that use photography and don’t like to claim themselves as a photographer, and I don’t care. What I want is their work.
The question of “use this medium” relates a lot the history of photography in multiple forms. Has the work of inscribing all those parameters and gathering them together been done? [The parameters] have always been combatted.
No one who comes here can say, “Photography is only this”, and no one can say “Photography is not contemporary art”. There is no specificity of the medium, and that’s how I want it.
How important do you think it is to have young talent emerging at these fairs?
It’s exciting! They’re trying hard and working hard with their submissions, and they have great projects–astonishing projects. A young career does not mean a young artist. For the moment, I wanted to avoid sectors like you see at other fairs. The idea was really to make the diversity obvious rather than regenerating categories. I think they’re better off in the middle of everything–mixed into everything. Then you realise that they are young and talented.
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