What's Not To Like? Paris Photo 2011/Le Bal/Offprint

Paris, November 2011.  To say why we like it would take too long.  So here it is.  In bullet points:-

Paris Photo 2011 - Grand Palais

• Bye bye Carrousel du Louvre, hello Grand Palais, site of the Universal Exposition 1900.  Ornate, light-filled gem of the Industrial Revolution, with space to play.  Happy visitors, light-averse gallerists protecting the 19th Century prints with curtains of felt.
• Guest country: Africa, selections from Rencontres Bamako, plus usual suspects Pieter Hugo, Samuel Fosso, Malike Sidibe, Seidou Keita. 
• New to Paris Photo 2011 - dedicated curated exhibitions, including Artur Walther's piquant collection counterbalancing African photography with August Sander and Bernd and Hilla Becher and Giorgio Armani-curated "Acqua".
• Highlights Grimaldi Brancolini - Peter Fraser's Deep Blue series, Clare Strand's tables and Sophy Rickett's anarchic office lady behaving badly.

Le Bal - Topographies of War 

• Exemplary curating by Jean-Yves Jouannais and Diane Dufour - no lectures, no mawkishness, no posturing rhetoric.
• Walid Raad's meticulous documentation of spent ordnance, collected, catalogued and traced to its sources
• Luc Delahaye and Eyal Weizman's The Space in This Room is Your Interpretation on the chilling subversion of critical texts by Deleuze and Guettary by the military 

Offprint

• Second year for this exciting new bookfair allowing artists to sell direct to the public
• Rooms and rooms of self-published photography books, rare vintage books and a range of small independent publishers.