Galerie Thomas Zander is devoted to acting as primary gallery for artists working in photography. What distinguishes these artists is that not all of them are exclusively considered as photographers and their work is not only received within an isolated discipline but in the larger context of contemporary art.

At Paris Photo 2019 Galerie Thomas Zander presents a curated selection of vintage and recent conceptual and documentary style photographic works highlighting a spectrum of the individual aesthetic strategies and conceptual approaches.  Presented artists include Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Lewis Baltz, Victor Burgin Peter Downsbrough, Mitch Epstein, Andrea Geyer, Anthony Hernandez, Candida Höfer, Jürgen Klauke, Helen Levitt, Dieter Meier, Tod Papageorge, Max Regenberg, Judith Joy Ross, Michael Schmidt, Larry Sultan and Henry Wessel.

The range of works spans the past 50 years until today, represent pioneering and innovative practices of photography in art. They contribute to the ongoing discussion about photography, reflecting wider questions concerning its role in contemporary art and visual culture at large. In view of the expansion of the use of photography in everyday life the proposed works create an awareness of the more profound aspects of the medium.

The presentation features a major group of portraits by American photographer Judith Joy Ross from her series Protest the War. Since the early 1980s, the photographer Judith Joy Ross (born 1946 in Hazleton, Pennsylvania) has produced a remarkable oeuvre focusing on sensitive, authentic portraits of people at the heart of society: school children and teachers, adolescents, soldiers, visitors at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C., or members of the U.S. Congress. Her portraits offer an aesthetic as well as a psychologically empathic approach to photography. Ross’s elaborate traditional way of working with a large format camera and tripod gives her the time to engage with the person she is about to photograph. The act of photographing itself becomes an intense encounter between photographer and subject, an expression of attention for and appreciation reflecting both empowerment and vulnerability. Thanks to the shallow depth of field, the photographs lift the people from the background, balancing visual intimacy and respectful distance.