In 1838, just over a decade after Nicéphore Niépce captured the first surviving photograph (View from the Window at Le Gras, dated to around 1826/1827), Louis Daguerre pointed his camera at the Boulevard du Temple in Paris. The exposure lasted a few minutes, and nothing that moved left a mark on the image. Carriages, passersby, the whole traffic of the city, vanished. Only two figures stayed still long enough to remain: one man with his foot raised, and another shining his shoes. Often described as the first instance of people being photographed, they stand alone in an empty city.
In 2026, France marks the bicentenary of the invention of photography, and the 29th edition of Paris Photo returns to the Grand Palais from 12 to 15 November, with 246 exhibitors from 38 countries. After 200 years, photography seems to be pulling in two directions at once: towards images no camera ever took, and back to its origins of silver, paper and chemistry that Daguerre and his contemporaries worked with. Visitors to the fair this year can see both forms, sometimes in the same room.
Welcome to the Grand Palais
Inside the Grand Palais, a 36m retrospective wall of Thomas Ruff’s work lines the entrance. Conceived as an ‘open book’, it moves through more than 40 years, from analogue images to digital simulations. Ruff joins Florian Ebner, head of the photography department at the Centre Pompidou, for a talk on his practice on Thursday 12 November at 2pm.
Further into the exhibition, the bicentenary is at its most literal. Hans P Kraus Jr brings works by Daguerre and Talbot, alongside Anna Atkins, whose cyanotypes of British algae, bound into volumes from 1843, are often recognised as the first photobook, a year before Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature.
Elles x Paris Photo
She’s also a reminder of how selectively the history of photography has been told, and a good way into the ‘Elles x Paris Photo’ path, curated this year by Aldeide Delgado, founder of the Women Photographers International Archive. Since the ‘Elles’ path launched in 2018, the share of women artists at the fair has nearly doubled, from 20 to 38 per cent. Delgado’s selection, ‘An Oceanic Beginning’, takes the ocean as a starting point for retelling photography’s history without a fixed centre
Among the selected works is Ous de granota (2025), Alba Yruela’s photograph of frogspawn suspended in murky water, each egg a dark pupil staring back. Yruela makes her Paris Photo debut with Barcelona gallery Chiquita Room in the ‘Emergence’ sector. Elle Pérez, who has a solo presentation at Public Relations, is also among the artists chosen by Delgado. Pérez works across photography, collage and film, and on Friday 13 November sits down with writer and curator Gem Fletcher for a conversation co-presented by Aperture and Fletcher’s podcast, The Messy Truth. Its title poses a question: what is the work of photography today?
Digital
The ‘Digital’ sector offers one answer. Its new curator, Marco De Mutiis of Fotomuseum Winterthur, argues that we no longer ‘see’ through optics alone, but through layers of Photoshop, social media aesthetics, facial recognition and memes. He also contributes an essay to ECAL’s ‘Soft Photography’, a research project led by the late Milo Keller, the school’s head of photography, and this year the fair’s educational programme. The project turns that idea towards emotion: images built to anger, soothe, or simply keep us scrolling, from rage-bait to ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response). Rather than asking whether an AI-generated image looks real, it asks what it’s designed to make us feel. De Mutiis discusses the project with the artist Charlie Engman on Thursday 12 November at 5pm.
Books
Friday 13 November belongs to books. At 3pm, the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards are announced at the fair, and at 6pm, Palm* Studios launches Molly Matalon’s Lil Big Beach Book, a first look at a larger archive of beach pictures by the California-based photographer. But for many, the book’s real home this week is on the water. At Port de Solférino on the Seine, the photobook fair Polycopies opens on the Concorde-Atlantique boat, from 1pm on Wednesday 11 November. Polycopies has grown from around 35 publishers when founded in 2014 to nearly 100 publishers and booksellers, spread across the boat and the quay beside it.
Among the tables this year is Ciao Press, the Swiss imprint Nicolas Polli founded at the end of 2017, which he describes as a ‘publishing playground’. Often photographer, designer and publisher on the same title, Polli last showed here in 2022, before a few years on the wider fair circuit. He’s back with a launch in collaboration with Éditions Images Vevey, Dominique Teufen’s Rays of Light – Reflected Realities, in which a reflective silver surface turns fragments of urban landscapes into something more painterly, with no digital manipulation. In an age of AI, it makes a quiet case for what light can still do on its own. Polli’s advice is to arrive as soon as the doors open. His Polycopies picks include publishers Skinnerboox, Yogurt Editions, Fraglich Publishing and Deadbeat Club. The last, based in Los Angeles, also makes its Paris Photo debut this year, with work by Daniel Dorsa, Cole Barash and Taylor Galloway, among others.
Around the city
Beyond the fairs, the bicentenary extends across the city. Now in its seventh edition, Photo Days brings together exhibitions across Paris throughout November. In the Studio at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Nanténé Traoré’s ‘pays des merveilles’, the artist’s first museum solo show, is made from pictures shot in Brittany on expired film from the 1990s. At the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, ‘Nicaragua, Histoire, Mémoire’ follows Susan Meiselas’s photographs of the 1978-79 revolution long after she took them, onto T-shirts, stamps, matchboxes and murals, used sometimes to celebrate the revolution and sometimes to contest it. And at the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s François-Mitterrand site, ‘Photographies japonaises’ draws on one of the first Western collections of postwar Japanese photography, begun in the late 1960s: around 250 prints and 50 rare books, including a section devoted to Japanese photographers looking at Paris.
Much of the week happens after hours, at openings, launches, and in bookshops across the city, and the first night is usually the busiest. On Thursday 12 November at 6pm, ECAL opens ‘Soft Photography’ at Espace Commines, a show that runs for just two days. Among the student works, Min Dai’s Rate My Cake renders a mouth in glossy orange, sweetness pushed until it starts to repel. From 7pm, Francesca Allen launches ‘Hair’ at Cahier Central, her second volume on the significance of long hair. The first, shot in Lithuania at a contest for the world’s longest hair, was shown at Paris Photo last year with Chloé Arts. This time, she follows 26 women who gathered in Las Vegas to compete for the first Miss Rapunzel title, photographing them away from the stage, their hair spilling across hotel beds and through the casinos. Later, the night moves to La Montgolfière in the tenth arrondissement, where Dans le Bain opens its first show, ‘Wild Ember Orchestra’, co-created with the independent imprint Pomegranate Press: a transatlantic exchange between American and French artists, Myles Loftin and Sarah Balhadère among them, open until 11pm.
Voices
By Sunday 15 November, after four days of looking, it’s worth thinking back to the image taken on the Boulevard du Temple in 1838. The two figures are visible only because they stood still; everything else in the street moved too fast for the plate. Now that problem has almost reversed. Images are made faster than anyone can look at them, and this year’s ‘Voices’ sector, curated by Zasha Colah and Francesco Zanot, takes disappearance as its theme. They look at photographs made to fade or destroy themselves, and AI images that look like photographs but no longer record anything. Across the week, the idea raised in Daguerre’s image keeps returning: what a photograph holds on to, and what it lets go.
Paris Photo runs 12-15 November 2026 at the Grand Palais