Paris Photo 2024: Grand Palais, 7 avenue Winston Churchill, 75008, Paris, France

We will exhibit rare vintage photographs by artists including Dora Maar, László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Horacio Coppola, Kansuke Yamamoto and Kati Horna to honour the 100^th anniversary of the Surrealist Manifesto, alongside further prints by Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Claude Cahun.

Highlights include Dora Maar's A l’Origine du Simulateur, Madrid (1932), which served as the source material for her significant collage work, Le Simulateur (1935). We will show a diverse group of photographs which depict the community of artists and intellectuals who contributed to the foundation of Surrealism in Paris during the 1920s. These include unique photomatons of significant figures such as Paul Éluard, Luis Buñuel and Louis Aragon from the collection of André Breton. Also included is a rare early portrait by Man Ray of his friends Henri Pierre Roché (the author of Jules et Jim) and Helen Hessel. This will be shown alongside photographs from Man Ray’s seminal series Mathematical Forms, created at the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris as a collaborative project with Marcel Duchamp.

Representing our longstanding commitment to Japanese photography, we will exhibit a group of important vintage works by Kansuke Yamamoto, the celebrated pre-war Japanese photographer and poet. Born in Nagoya, Yamamoto was exposed to European Surrealism during the 1930s, before co-founding the Nagoya Photo Avant-Garde in 1939.

At this edition of Paris Photo the gallery will launch our latest publication dedicated to Yamamoto’s life and works. Strictly limited to 125 copies this beautifully crafted book will be available for purchase at our stand (B41) at a special price of €65 during the fair (first 50 copies).

We will spotlight works by other Japanese artists including Ei-Q, Osamu Shiihara, Tōmatsu Shōmei and Shigeru Ōnishi. The gallery will also exhibit several important works that reflect the enduring influence of the Surrealist gaze in a more contemporary context. These include rare photographs by artists including Guy Bourdin, Irving Penn and Tim Walker, who have each embraced a Surreal emphasis on provocative contrast and the uncanny in their individual practices. To compliment this selection, we will also display some unusual 19^th century photography of the kind that Surrealist artists sought out as source material for their collages, fuelling their fascination with early photography.

Finally, we will show a series of Claude Cahun’s early collage work, first published as gravures in her unconventional masterpiece of memoir, Aveux non Avenus (1930). These platinum prints were created from original glass-plate negatives found at Cahun’s home in Jersey after her death, and printed by Studio 31. They will be available exclusively to institutions as reference materials, to further public understanding of Cahun’s radical legacy. All proceeds will be used to support an emerging artist exploring the possibilities of Surrealism today in photography.