Jean-François Lepage picks 8 highlights from Paris Photo 2023

Since his work was first published in the fashion magazine Depeche Mode in 1981, Paris-born photographer Jean-François Lepage has straddled the line between major editorial and commercial photography, and experimental fine art. In the ’90s, he dedicated most of his practice to painting, returning to fashion photography in the early ‘00s, before focusing exclusively on fine art in 2014.

Throughout all, Lepage preserved his distinctive voice. To create his captivating yet unsettling images, he almost assumes the role of a surgeon, manipulating and deconstructing the anatomy of his figures, cutting, etching and drawing on the surfaces of photographs to transform the original images.

At Paris Photo 2023, Lepage is exhibiting ‘Timeless Journey’ at TOBE Gallery, featuring 27 works, from his black and white prints of the 1980s, through to his hand-painted 8×10-inch Polaroids. He is also showing his most recent series, ‘Genèse’ (The Recycle Project) for which he repurposed films and photographs from his archive to construct novel compositions. After perusing the fair, Lepage selects his stand-outs for Plaster and shares his thoughts on each.

Jean-François Lepage’s top picks from Paris Photo 2023

1. David Thorp, See no evil (performance with gloves), 1979

My first pick from this year’s Paris Photo was an obvious choice. Rather than opting for a large-scale piece with an imposing frame, I’ve chosen a composition of nine small prints. These images are delicate, captivating and mysterious. David Thorp captures his wife, Juliet, as a character that one might believe to have escaped from the famous tennis scene from the 1966 film Blow-up by Michelangelo Antonioni.

2. Lee Miller photographed by Man Ray and Horst P. Horst

Lee Miller was a model for two great photographers: Man Ray and Horst P. Horst. She is hauntingly beautiful in these two photographs.

3. Clifford Prince King, Orange Grove

This publication is shortlisted for the 2023 Paris Photo Aperture PhotoBook Award. Intimate and emotional photographs – to me, it’s a perfect book.

4. Dave Heath, A Dialogue with Solitude 1961-1962

I was really intrigued by this wall at the Howard Greenberg Gallery. It displayed a large selection of the maquette from a book by the photographer Dave Heath.

5. Daisuke Yokota, Untitled 062, 061, 100, 151

These beautiful solarised analogue prints weren’t actually designed to be presented as a set, but they work so well together. For me, they managed to overshadow works from some much bigger names in the history of photography that were also presented at this stand.

6. Grete Stern, The Egg from Los Sueños (Dreams) and Yelena Yemchuk, Salute 2019

These are photomontages from women’s magazines from 1948-1951. After browsing through several hundred images, these kitsch pieces were a welcome break.

7. Nolwenn Brod, Les hautes Solitudes 

I loved the placement of these photographs. I felt they were placed together on the Galerie Vu stand with a great deal of care and intelligence.

8. Thomas Devaux at Bacqueville Gallery

A superb, intriguing and subtle piece by the artist Thomas Devaux – one of few and all too rare pieces of contemporary art in this Paris Photo 2023 edition.