ImageNation Paris 2025 is where instant photography feels most alive this year, and we’re proud to be the official sponsor. It matters to us because this show speaks our language: small frames, big honesty, and the courage to let chemistry have a say.
The exhibition gathers a wide constellation of artists who treat instant film as a conversation with time. You see integral colour pushed until it hums, emulsions lifted like skin to redraw the surface, double exposures that let a second thought join the first, gentle warmth used during development to tighten the palette, and the quiet rebellion of expired film coaxed into surprising tones. Every print is an object. You feel it in the borders, in the notes on the frame, in the way each copy carries the mood of the room where it was born.
There is also a guest who anchors the weekend. Neil Krug joins as a special guest, a reminder that instant photography isn’t nostalgia but a living vocabulary. His presence reinforces what this medium can do when you trust the process and accept the one-take risk that makes it sing.
What unites the show is not a single style but touch. Portraits ask for trust instead of polish. City corners glow like the last light after a concert. Landscapes hold their breath rather than shout. The work resists perfection because perfection is easy to fake. Presence is harder. You choose a frame, the chemistry answers back, and somewhere in that exchange, the image decides to stay.
We’ll be there all weekend, meeting artists, collectors, and friends, and sharing why we keep believing in this format. Instant photography is a practice of attention. It invites you to slow down, to let a picture arrive at its own pace, to accept a beautiful error and call it language. You leave with the sense that a photograph can still change the temperature of a room, that the smallest print can carry a life when the maker trusts the material. It’s personal, too. Our director will have a photo on the wall, one print that remembers the light of a specific day and the tiny risks it took to exist.
If you come, bring your curiosity. Touch the edges. Read the margins. Let the prints take their time. ImageNation Paris is not about forever. It is about now, held long enough to matter.
GALERIE JOSEPH LE PALAIS
5 Rue Saint-Merri, Paris