PRESS RELEASE
PARIS PHOTO 2023
9–12 November 2023
England & Co is pleased to be taking part again at Paris Photo, held at the Grand Palais Éphémère for the last time before the fair returns next year to the Grand Palais itself.
The theme of the gallery’s presentation of photographs from the 1950s/’60s/’70s/’80s is around ideas of Performance: from artists’ use of photography to bring material presence to ephemeral, time-based events and concepts, to more documentary images of actual ‘performers’.
In the 1970s, British artist David Thorp’s performative images play with physical and psychological boundaries, sometimes involving his own solo performances, and sometimes in collaborations with his partner. He was interested in limitations of movement, concealment, voyeurism, and the avoidance of, or response to, the gaze.
Swiss-born artist, Gérald Ducimetière made Polaroids of gallery visitors as they entered a gallery in Geneva, making them the subjects of his exhibition examining concepts of ‘absolute singularity and indistinct plurality’. His multi-image work, Identitie/Identities (1977) is an observation of people attending an opening in a photographic gallery and who, instead of having an exhibition to look at, find themselves confronted with their own image, as individuals but also as a group.
The eminent British performance artist, Anne Bean’s images emerge from her elemental live performances and actions over four decades, some currently on view in the Tate Britain exhibition, Women in Revolt! Irish artist Roberta M. Graham explored violent relationships between the human body and the world in her disturbing hand-coloured photomontages.
London photographer and author, Rose Boyt, photographed her father, Lucian Freud in his studio in 1978, while her punk friends performed for her camera in the King’s Road outside Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McClaren’s shop, Seditionaries.
Another well-known British performance artist, Silvia Ziranek, posed for her own camera in 1975 in a series she titled FANNY BY GASLIGHT/DATE WITH DESTINY. In these studio images she presents herself in fashion model poses of the era – she says ‘in emulation, not copy’.
In his two-negative print from 1975, Militarism/Belittling the Russians by Making Fun of Them, Belgian-born photographer, John Francis Brown put the negative of a self-portrait of himself in his bedroom waving chairs at the ceiling, below the negative of another TV image of Russian generals, printing them both to produce his two-part final print, so that he appears to be performing a ‘protest’ action against the military figures in the top half of the image.
From 1951 to 1954, the noted Parisian art-dealer and expert on Surrealism, Marcel Fleiss photographed legendary jazz musicians in New York and Paris, many of these images recently published in his memoire of those years. His photographs of noted figures including Thelonious Monk, Ella Fitzgerald, Dave Brubeck and Miles Davis, were published in jazz magazines and books.
American-based photographer, Mitja Hinderks recorded London’s 1960s counterculture, making many historic images of the legendary performance and art collective, The Exploding Galaxy during their London performance events and inside their communal house in North London. British photographer, Clay Perry also documented London’s 1960s avant-garde art scene, photographing the experimental SIGNALS gallery, and making portraits of Yoko Ono.