11 Photographers With Solo Shows at Paris Photo 2013

Get to know these talented artists on the day this historic fair opens in Paris.

Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

Paris Photo, the prestigious fine art photography fair that takes place every year, is a legendary event that gets photography experts and enthusiasts together to discuss the art of the still image and present the best in the genre from galleries worldwide. We've rounded up a list of the artists who are presenting solo exhibitions at Paris Photo this year, taking place from November 14 to 17 at the Garnd Palais in Paris (it took place in LA for the first time earlier this year), some who are established and others who you may be hearing about for the first time. Each photographer has their own way of encapsulating a moment, reminding us that the camera is still a powerful, multi-faceted tool that has gone from documenting fine art to becoming an actual tool for it.

Get to know these 11 Photographers With Solo Shows at Paris Photo 2013, simply because we cannot afford to fly you over there.

Marc Trivier

Age: 53
Location: Dinant, Belgium
Gallery: Bernard Bouche, Paris

By the age of 20, Marc Travier had already photographed the likes of Francis Bacon, Leiris, Beckett, Genet, Warhol, and Michaux. His aesthetic is quite nostalgic; his images are usually blurred, aged, and not properly printed or framed. Some of them are so faded that they almost look nonexistent. His work reminds us that the photograph isn't solely about the content, but the feeling that we get from looking at it. The exhibition of his work at Paris Photot focuses on his early work ranging from portraiture to landscape photography.

Paul Thorel

Age: 57
Location: Paris and Naples, France
Gallery: Guido Costa Projects, Turin

Following the success of Paul Thorel's show at the MEP in 2012, the photographer will be exhibiting at the Guido Costa Gallery for Paris Photo. He will display a large installation made from his series "Correnti Oblique" (2013), which will be presented to the public for the first time as a wall installation. The photographs are ink-jet prints, each hand-colored by the artist. Following the recent trend towards digital art, the Guido Costa gallery will also present a brand new digital carpet based on a famous photo landscape by the artist.

Juergen Teller

Age: 49
Location: London
Gallery: Suzanne Tarasieve, Paris

If you've ever opened up a fashion magazine, you will recognize Juergen Teller's work. His style is depicted as a blend of intimate moments, which are sometimes uncomfortable to look at, and often so bright that they are almost over-exposed. Borrowing from both modesty and exhibitionism, his photography always tells a story, albeit one with many interpretations. The exhibition in Paris features some of his most famous works, which includes The Naked Vivienne, a photo taken of the punk fashion designer in London. This portrait of the aging figurehead of fashion history perfectly illustrates the artist's controversial yet sensitive approach to photography.

Sarah Schönfeld

Age: 34
Location: Berlin
Gallery: Feldbushwiesner, Berlin

All You Can Feel is an experiment conducted by Sarah Schönfeld. She sprinkled her photo negatives with substances like LSD, heroin, or caffeine, which then started to react on its surface. She appeals to a varied audience by combining drugs and photography, which are usually seen as opposing approaches to experiencing reality. The individual prints are snapshots of a specific moment in time, because the substances continue to chemically react on the negatives.

Sophie Ristelhueber

Age: 64
Location: Paris
Gallery: Jérôme Poggi, Paris

Sophie Ristelhueber, the winner of the 2010 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, addresses the contemporary question of landscapes and ruins, while bringing together historic works from her Beirut series during the 1980s and her series from the Kuwait desert in the early 1990s. Although she presents destruction, there is an ultimately romantic quality to her work. Her photo are also on display at the Pompidou Center across from the likes of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray.

Josef Hoflehner

Age: 58
Location: Austria
Gallery: Nicholas Ruzicska, Salzburg

"Jet Airliner," by Austrian artist Josef Hoflehner, is an exhibition of black-and-white archival pigment ink prints taken in Saint-Martin, where planes fly over bathers at a height of only 10-20 meters. Hoflehner concentrates on the spectacle between man and technology, where jet planes and people are suddenly on the same level. His photographs are special because they are truly unreproducible and timeless.

Ori Gersht

Age: 46
Location: Tel Aviv, Israel and London
Gallery: Mummery +Schnelle, London

Mummery + Schnelle will be presenting the photographic work of Ori Gersht for his first big show in Paris since his museum exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. In close collaboration with the artist, the Paris Photo exhibition will include key works selected from some of Ori Gersht's most important series, all of which use flowers as a subject. Don't get it twisted, though—these flowers are used as a tool to explore the relationship between beauty, violence, time, transience, loss, and aesthetic sensibility. This stuff is much heavier than your standard still lifes.

Lara Dhondt

Age: 34
Location: Antwerp, Belgium
Gallery: Bourouina, Berlin

Lara Dhondt specializes in documenting forgotten and found objects, typically in the urban landscape, in an effort to shed light onto places that are not given the time of day. For Memento, her exhibition for Paris Photo 2013, featuring black-and-white images printed on Corten steel, she displayed her work like tiles on the wall of the gallery. Her images are quite optimistic conceptually considering how sad her photos appear on the surface.

Stephan Crasneanscki

Age: 44
Location: New York
Gallery: Ilan Engel, Paris

Stephan Crasneanscki, a multidisciplinary artist that founded Soundwalk, has always had a fascination with the spiritual aspect of nature. He is presenting a series for Ilan Engel Gallery that focuses on the divine elements of nature and its influence on perceptions of the human mind. Each of these photographs pay tribute to an idea, philosophy, or religion—to human beings and, ultimately, to the mystery they represent.

Jeff Cowen

Age: 47
Location: Berlin
Gallery: Michael Werner, Paris

Jeff Cowen started photographing the streets of New York in the late 1980s, and over time, his images have started to delve deeper into abstraction. His work plays with the idea that photography can be used as a medium of art, not necessarily of reality. Cowen works exclusively with traditional, silver-based analog photography, which contrasts his methods of manipulation and his romantic depictions of an actual happening.

Horst Ademait

Age: 76
Location: Cologne, Germany
Gallery: Suzanne Zander, Cologne

The Susanne Zander gallery from Cologne, Germany will be presenting Ademeit's work at Paris Photo this year. The artist defies photographic expectations by offering his Polaroids on the art market as opposed to his usual exhibitions at museums. For this exhibition, Horst Ademeit was inspired by cold rays, earth rays, electromagnetic waves, and various other rays that are found around us. As a result, he has a body of a couple thousand photographs that have a dense amount of his own notes written on them. Thus, text and images go hand in hand to give you an honest account of these scientific and ethereal happenings.