“Chaos has invaded the visible surface and shaken the aesthetic order of the past, it is the distorted aesthetic chaos that spreads through the unbroken flow of images”, wrote André Rouillé in digital photography. A neoliberal force in 2020 (L’Echappée edition). Two years before the advent of generative artificial intelligence, tools capable of generating large numbers of images from written instructions (prompts), the French academic who died in May also wrote: “The search for truth has turned into the consumption of fiction.” So how can photography fare in such chaos? What gives value to an image today?
This is the essence of Paris Photo, the major exhibition dedicated to photography and drawing, the 28th edition of which starts Thursday 13 November at the Grand Palais. Every year, he watched the market develop, and also the photographers, some of whom, because of the fever, felt sad.
