Raphael Stoppen, curator of Paris Photo 2024. “Women photographers should be recognized as having the right to be complex and different.”

Far from the frame, female photographers are gradually regaining their rightful place in the spotlight. In 2018, the Paris Photo Fair, aware of their underrepresentation, created a special route, Elles × Paris Photo, supported by the Ministry of Culture and Kering through its Women in Motion program.

The purpose: Encourage galleries to feature more women in their booths. Since then, their visibility in the corridors of the Grand Palais has continued to grow. Update with Raphael Stoppin, director of the Normandy Photography Center in Rouen and curator of this sixth edition.

Madame Figaro. – Although the representation of female artists at the fair increased from 20 to 38 % In six years, parity has not yet been achieved. How do you explain that?
Rafael Stopin. – In order to understand these figures, it is necessary to take into account the specificity of the social, cultural and political fact that from the invention of photography to the middle of the 20th century;^e century, made it difficult for women to enter professional artistic practice. The very broad spectrum of history covered by the fair actually leads to their numerical inferiority. If the course serves to highlight forgotten or neglected artists, it does not have the power to correct the inequality of opportunity, which I hope will be corrected over time, as the barriers to the realization of these titles are less than they once were. . This initiative, linked to other concurrent initiatives, encourages gallery owners and capillary action institutions to gradually complete the creative landscape.

Your choice is particularly focused on the silences of the story. Can you tell us more about this “unequal distribution of footprints” pointed out by the historian and feminist? Michel Perrot?
History is obviously the place of discoveries. This is also a just return for deeds that have not reached posterity; unlike artists in their 30s or 40s who enjoy some attention, previous generations have developed their work in considerable silence. I have found it beneficial to look at contemporary issues, showing where possible that there are precedents. The idea is not to minimize the commitments of the emerging work, but to place them in continuity by questioning their foundations. I think of Italian Letizia Battaglia’s reports on the Sicilian social landscape (Galerie Alberto Damian) and Catalan Pilar Aymerich’s (RocioSantaCruz) reports on feminist movements.

You also insist on the many paths taken by artists who have long been confined to “domestic photography” dominated by the narrative of the self. What are these side roads? ?
Photography is inherently ambiguous. It is both a medium of artistic expression and a tool chosen by the mass media to construct models of slavery. Many female photographers therefore naturally worked to create alternative representations of the female condition. But access to art does not necessarily occur in response to a dominant image form. It is also a choice in itself, a desire to get out of a certain perimeter, to face the difficulties of the environment. It is important not to limit the field of women once again by reserving for them a sphere, in this case, an intimate one, where they will be legitimate to speak. We must recognize their complexity, their right to be different, their right to steal, formulate hypotheses. Therefore, I also made sure to choose artists who were oriented toward experimentation. Like Japan’s Hisae Imai, who deals with identity with the plastic bias associated with SMITH (PGI & The Third Gallery Aya). the Dutch Kim Boske, who embeds images digitally or in the very fiber of paper (Thick // Soil); or the German Alina Frieske, whose photomontages of images taken from social networks resemble paintings drawn with a knife (Fabien Levy).

For the first time, the program, supported by Kering, provides concrete assistance to four galleries entering the fair. For what?
Presenting a solo act at a fair is quite a significant commercial risk, especially if it is a female soloist and a first entry. Hence the idea of ​​this financial motivation. At Higher Pictures (New York), we’ll find intimate and performative self-portraits by Carla Williams and Janice Guy, as well as Grape vine By Susan Leeper, a long-running series about a West Virginia misfit community. Martini & Ronchetti (Genoa) will show the work of pianist Lisetta Carmi, who documented the transvestite community in Genoa in the 1970s before founding an ashram in Puglia. Monitor (Rome) will present the painting of Eliza Montessori, an artist whose unique and sensual prints derive from designs and episodes close to conceptual art. Finally, Nadja Vilenne (Liège) will show Aglaia Konrad’s monumental installations that place an inventory of urban forms like a construction game. A real game when we know the limitations that inspire the scenography of the stands, which are mainly designed according to the available square meters.

Like the Lebanese author Hanan El-Cheikh, who would like to write indifferently about women, men and ants, you would like artists to be appointed regardless of gender. It seems we are still limited to raising awareness…
This paradox arises more from structural necessity than from the intellectual premise that there would be a work defined by its femininity. Elles × Paris Photo remains a tool first and foremost. Perhaps one day, if it works, we can do without it.

Paris Photo, November 7-10 at the Grand Palais in Paris. parisphoto.com: