As Paris Photo celebrates its 28th edition in 2025, the fair once again makes strides to position itself at the heart of photographic diversity and heritage. Bringing together more than 200 galleries and 45 publishers across its Main, Emergence, Digital, Voices, and Book sectors, the event continues to bridge pioneering historical works with the bold perspectives shaping the medium today. This year, a significant shift stands out: 39% of the photographers represented are women -a record presence that signals a long-overdue recalibration of visibility within the field. Alongside this progression, non-binary artists are increasingly carving out space within the global conversation photography sparks.
We highlight a selection of female and non-binary photographers whose practices expand the boundaries of image-making and challenge the narratives that have long dominated photographic history. Their work offers not only artistic brilliance, but also new ways of seeing.
Atong Atem
Atong Atem, an Ethiopian-born South Sudanese artist and writer based in Naarm/Melbourne, uses portraiture to examine how photographs shape our understanding of people and the stories we attach to them. She plays with the act of looking by inserting imaginative, window-like shapes over her subjects' faces, encouraging viewers to see them through an intentionally surreal filter. Drawing inspiration from influential African studio photographers such as Malick Sidibé, Philip Kwame Apagya, and Seydou Keïta, Atem creates imagery that reflects her connection to culture and heritage. Working across photography, video, and textiles, she delves into themes of migration, diasporic experience, postcolonial identity, and the shifting boundaries between personal and public space-using portraiture as a way to contemplate belonging and the meaning of home.
Atong Atem is represented by Mars Gallery.
Chloé Azzopardi
Chloé Azzopardi blends photography with sculptural objects and performative gestures to imagine alternative futures in her new body of work, Non technological devices. She constructs handmade "low-tech" tools from found natural materials-objects that imitate modern gadgets yet look like relics from an unfamiliar world. Paired with mysterious creations whose functions are unknown, these hybrid forms build a speculative environment that reflects our collective visions of what lies ahead. Her aim is to spark new longings and offer imagery that can feed our imagination.
Through playful fiction, Azzopardi proposes different ways of envisioning enhanced or transformed bodies, inventing organic cyborgs that integrate more closely with their surroundings. By poetically reworking symbols of technological progress, she questions our reliance on industrial production, the depletion of natural resources, and humanity's impact on the environment. Her work searches for new models of coexistence with the living world and suggests a visual language for ecological resistance.
Chloé Azzopardi is represented by Galerie Fisheye.
Camila Falquez
Camila Falquez, a Colombian photographer who grew up between Mexico and Spain, uses the visual language of fashion and portraiture to celebrate a broad and inclusive range of identities. Drawing on surrealist influences and rich, painterly tones, she constructs images that foreground community, dignity, and the fight for visibility.
Her series Gods That Walk Among Us doesn't simply question traditional ideas of beauty, authority, or gender-it actively challenges and overturns them. Falquez's portrait sessions are highly collaborative and full of energy; accompanied by rhythms like Salsa, Rumba, and Flamenco, her subjects step into an elevated, almost mythic presence. Through this shared creative process, her sitters appear radiant and powerful, embodying transformation and the possibility of change.
Camila Falquez is represented by Hannah Traore Gallery.
Agnès Geoffray
Agnès Geoffray works at the intersection of images, objects, and spatial art, exploring how pictures and texts can be revived, altered, and staged. By re-creating and recombining found material-often drawn from historical archives-she brings hidden tensions and half-forgotten narratives back to the surface. Her practice revolves around transforming existing imagery into constructed fictions that tap into shared cultural memories.
These visual fragments, absorbed into our minds over time, form a kind of collective inner landscape. Geoffray's work encourages viewers to revisit these traces and reconsider what they think they remember.
She is represented by Galerie Maubert.
Martine Gutierrez
Martine Gutierrez works across multiple media, using photography, film, and pop-culture aesthetics to question how identity is shaped, marketed, and consumed. She creates her own faux ads, glossy magazine spreads, videos, and large-scale visuals-replicating the very commercial formats that usually dictate standards of beauty and power-only to dismantle them from within.
In these works, she plays every part herself: model, director, stylist, producer, and protagonist. By doing so, she exposes how gender roles, cultural expectations, and ideals of desirability are constructed, while humorously destabilizing the visual language of mainstream media. Her practice rejects rigid dualities, instead presenting identity as fluid, layered, and interwoven.
Gutierrez's perspective is shaped by her mixed cultural background, her experience as a first-generation artist with Indigenous roots, and her engagement with LGBTQ communities. Through constant self-reinvention, she demonstrates how personal and collective identities can expand beyond predefined categories.
Martine Gutierrez is represented by Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
Kumi Oguro
Kumi Oguro, born in Japan in 1972, studied photography in London before completing her training at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. She later explored video and installation during postgraduate studies in Brussels, where she focused on the boundary between still and moving imagery-a theme she continued in her master's research in Film Studies at the University of Antwerp.
Oguro's photographs construct an alternative reality that sits just beside everyday life. Her images resist linear narratives and carry a subtle, elusive atmosphere-difficult to name, much like trying to recall a fading dream. She consistently works with female figures in deliberately arranged scenes, drawn to the tension she sees in women: a constant oscillation between attraction and unease, vulnerability and force, lightness and sorrow.
Kumi Oguro is represented by IBASHO.
Emma Sarpaniemi
Emma Sarpaniemi, an artist working in Helsinki, uses witty and theatrical self-portraits to rethink what femininity can mean. Treating self-imaging as a space for experimentation, she embraces play as a way to disrupt familiar expectations and open up alternative expressions of identity.
She is represented by JARMUSCHEK + PARTNER.
Melissa Schriek
Melissa Schriek's work centers on examining how individuals-especially women-navigate their surroundings, their inner worlds, and their relationships. Her practice remains deeply rooted in portraying the nuances of womanhood, a subject she continues to revisit with intention and curiosity.
Her interest in photography began during childhood, when a school excursion and a disposable camera sparked an early love for framing scenes and guiding her classmates into poses. Encouraged by her father, she soon had a small digital camera and documented her everyday experiences, long before she considered photography an art form.
Schriek draws much of her inspiration from ordinary moments: gestures, clothing, movement, and the subtle ways people interact. She often becomes captivated by simple objects or scenes that others might overlook. Through this attention to the everyday, her images blur the line between photographic realism and painterly interpretation, inviting viewers to rethink what is familiar and to recognize the poetic potential in the mundane.
Melissa Schriek is represented by Hama Gallery.
Rezvan Zahedi
Rezvan Zahedi, born in 1987 in Booshehr, Iran, began her artistic practice at age 20 by documenting protest graffiti condemning discrimination against women. Due to censorship and restrictive Islamic laws, she couldn't exhibit her work and eventually fled to France.
Her practice blends photography and calligraphy to explore the female body, gender identities, and the prejudices surrounding them. Drawing from the tradition of political graffiti, she creates inscriptions-silhouettes, phrases, and Persian letters-placed in intimate or private spaces such as abandoned buildings or studio-photographed bodies.
Through this interplay of written marks and physical presence, Zahedi seeks to challenge imposed "reading grids," expose systems of oppression, and give voice to women silenced by patriarchy. Her work denounces censorship, commodification of women, and forced marriages, while celebrating beauty, femininity, love, emancipation, and freedom. She now lives and works in Paris.
She is represented by Galerie Carole Kvasnevski.
The photographers highlighted here offer perspectives that stretch beyond aesthetics, engaging with identity, environment, memory, and belonging through personal and culturally resonant practices. Their work reminds us that the future of photography depends on multiplicity: on opening space for new narratives, challenging inherited frameworks, and embracing forms of expression that refuse to fit into established norms. In celebrating these artists, Paris Photo 2025 affirms that the most compelling images of our time are those that expand who gets to be seen, and how.
