The exhibition presents both digital prints produced in Seoul and the artists’ vintage prints. This juxtaposition reveals photography not merely as an image, but as a medium that exists as a material object. Traditional photographic processes—such as heliography, daguerreotype, cyanotype, and gelatin silver print—continue to be explored by artists today, highlighting the tactile dimension of photography where traces of light, chemistry, and material converge. Some works are presented as unique, non-editioned pieces, underscoring the possibility of photography existing as a singular work of art. Meanwhile, the development of digital technologies and AI-based image generation introduces another shift in photography, suggesting that the medium today can be understood as a site where traditional materiality and contemporary technological conditions coexist.
The exhibition brings together 53 artists, including three Korean artists. Through diverse perspectives and approaches, their works explore the temporal and everyday dimensions of the city, opening a space in which multiple interpretations of a single urban environment coexist. Beyond familiar images, viewers encounter another Paris—a city where memory and experience intersect, an “unseen” Paris.
Furthermore, the exhibition invites a reconsideration of Seoul through the “othered” gaze of Paris. Shaped by rapid growth, urban expansion, and the divide between center and periphery, Seoul shares structural conditions with “Grand Paris,” the two cities reflecting one another like mirrors. In this sense, the exhibition is not only about Paris but can also be read as another way of seeing Seoul. Visitors are invited not simply to observe a city, but to experience their own way of seeing through a field where multiple perspectives intersect.
This exhibition was conceived in collaboration with Alain Sayag, former head of the photography department at the Centre Pompidou. He is widely recognized for having transformed photography from a documentary medium into a central language of contemporary art. By reconfiguring the ways in which photography is collected and exhibited, he fundamentally redefined the conditions under which photography exists as an art form.
Curator
Alain Sayag, former head of the photography department at the Centre Pompidou
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