For Paris Photo 2025, Galerie Rouge brings together five major voices in photography, all linked by a profound connection to the body, intimacy, and human presence. The works of Sheila Metzner, Claude Batho, Erica Lennard, Barbara Crane, and Édouard Boubat form a constellation where memory intertwines with visual poetry.

From November 13 to 16, 2025, at the Grand Palais, Galerie Rouge will present a sensitive and daring exhibition. Through a selection of works by photographers with profoundly penetrating visions, the Parisian gallery weaves a transgenerational narrative. Each series explores the intimate relationship between the image and bodies, objects, everyday life, or the movement of crowds.

The central figure of this exhibition is Sheila Metzner, an American fashion photographer born in 1939 in Brooklyn. She was the first woman to collaborate regularly with the magazine Vogue in a male-dominated world. His pictorial and sensual compositions reveal a unique aesthetic, influenced by the pictorialism of Stieglitz and Steichen. His use of the Fresson process, a handcrafted technique with a grainy finish, lends his prints a velvety and nostalgic texture. Metzner blurs the lines between commercial photography and artistic creation, as evidenced by Uma, Patou Dress ou Saxophone Vase, two images that are as sculptural as they are mysterious.

Alongside her work, the gallery presents the restrained vision of the French photographer Claude Batho. In her black and white photographs from the 1970s, the camera lingers on scenes of domestic life: wet laundry, a deserted hallway, children absorbed in their own world. These are fragments of a life lived to the fullest, even in illness, which the photographer transforms into silent poems. She said: "They are filled with the passage of time, on children, people, and things. I wanted to capture very simple moments, to retain their silences."

The journey continues with the series The women, the sisters Erica Lennard's work, on display this year at the Rencontres d'Arles photography festival, features portraits taken in the 1970s that are an ode to sisterhood. Lennard photographs her sister Elizabeth and her friends in elegant settings, both natural and urban. Far from an objectifying gaze, she highlights free women, aware of their beauty, in a search for personal and collective identity. Intimacy here becomes a political manifesto, at a time when feminist struggles were intensifying in France.

Further along in the exhibition, visitors will be able to discover an iconic series by Barbara Crane: People of the North PortalBetween 1970 and 1971, the photographer installed a camera at the exit of the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. She captured, in a series of formal snapshots, the gestures and attitudes of visitors. The result is both documentary and experimental, revealing a fragmented portrait of American society at the time. Crane, a major figure in experimental photography in the United States, constantly challenged the medium's conventions, working with repetition, series, superimpositions, and changes of scale.

Finally, the Galerie Rouge presents several rare prints of Lella, Édouard Boubat's muse. These photographs, taken during the Liberation, depict a suspended moment between youth, love, and rebirth. Through hands, gazes, and shadows, Boubat sketches the portrait of a free woman, the subject of the image rather than its object, revealing the strength of an artistic and romantic bond.

By bringing these works together, Galerie Rouge offers much more than a simple exhibition. It offers a meditation on the gaze, memory, the feminine presence, the gentleness and power contained in the ordinary, making Paris Photo the stage for a conversation between generations, territories and aesthetics, where each image is a fragment of a story to be recomposed.

Paris Photo
Grand Palais
From November 13 to 16 November 2025

www.parisphoto.com