Paris Photography Exhibitions: Araki, Guibert, Rovner, Delahaye, Appelt

A critical review of several photography exhibitions in Paris in late 2005 contrasts the decline of Nobuyoshi Araki with the enduring delicacy of Hervé Guibert's work. At the Palais de Tokyo, Araki's video installation 'Arakinema' and a performance are deemed vacuous, while Guibert's small-format black-and-white photographs at the Maison européenne de la photographie retain a fragile, melancholic grace. At the Galerie nationale du Jeu de paume, two exhibitions offer a more vital engagement with contemporaneity: 'Croiser des mondes. Aspects du documentaire contemporain' features works by Emmanuelle Antille, Geert Goiris, Stanley Greene, Guillaume Herbaut, and Janaina Tschäpe, exploring documentary photography's intersection with art and journalism. Goiris creates perceptual destabilization through hyper-real description, while Herbaut's narrative investigations of Auschwitz and Nagasaki probe memory and the trace of evil. Michal Rovner's monumental projection 'Fields of Fire' (2005) at the same venue metaphorically addresses violence, memory, and human fragility through moving silhouettes and sound by Heiner Goebbels. At La Maison rouge, Luc Delahaye's large-format, aestheticized war photographs are criticized for spectacularizing conflict, with the exception of his Opep meeting image. Dieter Appelt's concurrent exhibition 'Cinema prisma' presents a more compelling, morbid universe exploring embodiment and the world through materials like stone and plaster.