Two L.A. fairs focus on photography

Paris Photo and Photo Independent events feature work from galleries plus known and emerging artists.

Two art fairs in Hollywood this weekend put the focus squarely on photography.

Paris Photo Los Angeles, the U.S. edition of the longrunning French fair, will take over the Paramount Pictures back lot.

The smaller, artist-focused Photo Independent, which launched last year, will set up shop across the street at Raleigh Studios.

Paris Photo is expecting 20,000 people this weekend. Its new director, Florence Bourgeois, and new artistic director, Christoph Wiesner, are putting their stamp on an event that showcases historical and contemporary work.

Photo Independent, founded by Fabrik Media’s Chris Davies, consists mainly of artists who aren’t represented by galleries and are looking for new audiences for their work. It’s expecting upward of 7,000 visitors this year.

As leaders for the larger Paris Photo, Bourgeois and Wiesner expanded the participation of international galleries, bringing in exhibitors from Australia, Belgium, Iran and Switzerland for the first time. The fair also will feature more than 30 solo shows largely dedicated to the work of emerging artists.

On Thursday, UCLA master of fine arts student CJ Heyliger won the fair’s $5,000 Introducing! Young California Photographer Award. He and five other California MFA students will have their work exhibited at Paris Photo.

“California Unedited!” will showcase portraits from the archives of R.J. Arnold, providing a glimpse of California’s diverse communities at the turn of the century.

The “Sound and Vision” program will feature conversations with artists and curators as well as selected screenings of artists’ video work.

“Los Angeles is today one of the world’s richest artistic hubs, attracting more and more large galleries,” Bourgeois said. “A fair was the logical next step for a city with such a burgeoning art scene with strong figures in the arts, as well as ties to both the Asian and South American art markets.”

Added Wiesner: “Hollywood also has a rich artistic heritage and long history of image-based art and specifically moving image. This is why our placement at Paramount Pictures studios fits so well.”

Fostering new talent is why Photo Independent director Davies established his fair in the first place.

“With the existing galleries and art fairs, it seemed like extremely talented photographers, many independent, were being underrepresented,” Davies said. “With Photo Independent, I wanted to create a frontand-center showcase for photographers both with and without gallery representation. I saw a deep hole, and I wanted to fill it.”

A jury of four curators vetted submissions with an eye toward “which artists were doing interesting contemporary work,” Davies said. “Then we thought about how they would all fit together as a gestalt. We want to have museum-quality work, professionally finished, and we favored bold, dramatic and unique types of work.”

Among this year’s standouts, Davies noted Robert Stivers’ “beautifully mysterious and captivating images,” Belgian photographer Laurent Maes’ overhead photos of ships, Richard Slechta’s large, minimalist hybrids of painting and photography, and Mei Xian Qiu’s “mise-en-scenes that she directs with a surreal cast of sexy, gender-ambiguous Jungian characters.”

Photo Independent will launch areas devoted to photography books and to art galleries that wanted to exhibit with the event’s photographers.

“After last year’s Photo Independent, we started receiving inquiries from galleries about participating, as they saw the energy our fair had and wanted to be a part of it, so we decided to create a new section called Photo Contemporary, to differentiate from independent photographers,” Davies said.

Setting up shop at Raleigh Studios, directly across the street from Paris Photo L.A., was not an accident, he said.

“I would be disingenuous not to admit that being right across the street from another world-class photography fair — and all the internationals that walk across Melrose Avenue to see our artists — is good luck, don’t you think?” Davies said. Last year, “we had many collectors and dealers walk across Melrose Avenue to see what our fair had to offer. This year, we are having shuttle buses taking attendees back and forth between both fairs.”