Araki scatters petals at Paris Photo

A hot-topic at Paris Photo fair today has been the increasingly blurred relationship between photography and art. Yesterday at the Grand Palais we spoke with Brad Feuerhelm, director of the Daniel Blau gallery, London/Munich, about the way their rare NASA photographs, and others like it, have transcended classification as photography and entered into the realm of 'art-object'. While we were talking, we got onto the topic of another exhibition the gallery are showing throughout Paris Photo with Galerie Meyer of notorious Japanese art-photographer Nobuyoshi Araki’s polaroids.

Araki is classed not only as a photographer but also as a contemporary artist, confirming the ever more indistinguishable nature of the two practices. The subjects Araki photographs range from everyday life, food, his late wife (and late cat) to perhaps most famously - his many lovers. He looks intimately at ideas surrounding death and sex, challenging the social taboos that surround these themes.

The exhibition Femme-Fleurs (November 3 - 30) showcases unpublished images of, as the name suggests - women and flowers, and takes place at Galerie Meyer in Paris' cultural hub of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

There are many photography exhibitions taking place in the area but as the stand-out-show, Femme-Fleurs has been attracting huge crowds and many of the photographs have already been purchased. Anthony Meyer who owns the gallery explained to Phaidon that each polaroid is a one-off, signed and dated by the artist, the uniqueness of each image giving the photographs an art-object-like status.

“Polaroids have a special colour - a slightly dulled technicolour and a nostalgic link to the past that appeals to everyone who remembers using them” – said Meyer.

Challenging social taboos in subject, harking back to a by-gone era of photography in technique and asserting photography as a contemporary art-form, Araki's Femme-Fleurs polaroids make for a fascinating show which continues until November 30.

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