Paris Photo will mark two hundred years of photography with its 29th edition, running November 12 to 15, 2026, at the Grand Palais in Paris — and it's building the whole fair around a question rather than a birthday party: what, today, counts as a photograph?

That tension is the edition's stated theme: the relationship between history and transformation. Historical works, contemporary projects, photobooks and digital experiments will share a programme framed by the medium's bicentenary. The fair says its interest lies in connections between practices separated by decades — early photographic processes hung beside works probing the image's material qualities, its uses and its entanglement with technology. Fair enough. But the framing carries an implicit claim worth testing: that juxtaposition alone produces insight. The source doesn't say which specific early works will hang next to which contemporary ones. We're promised dialogue; we'll see the pairs in November.

What survives the medium's own transformation?

The Main sector gives the history lesson its anchors. Hans P. Kraus Jr., the New York gallery long associated with photography's origins, will present pioneers including Daguerre, William Henry Fox Talbot and Anna Atkins — the cyanotype botanist whose 1843 work stands, for many historians, as the first photographically illustrated book. That lineage, at least, is precise.

Thomas Ruff gets the edition's most prominent single platform: an installation spanning more than forty years of work. The choice is defensible. From analogue photography to digital simulations, Ruff has spent a career testing how tools and contexts alter what we recognize as a photographic image. Few living artists fit a bicentenary brief about a medium rewriting itself as neatly.

Isabelle Le Minh approaches the same legacy from another angle, with investigations into photography's history and boundaries. And the Main sector will also make room for social histories: Merry Alpern's Dirty Windows — the series of clandestine views into a Manhattan club's back windows — alongside Miguel Ángel Rojas's photographs made in Bogotá cinemas during the 1970s. Both raise questions of intimacy, observation and spaces of encounter. Neither is a new discovery; both reward re-seeing in this context.

How does a preservation medium confront disappearance?

The curated Voices sector, by Francesco Zanot and Zasha Colah, takes disappearance as its premise. That's the sharpest conceptual move in the programme. A medium built on preserving memory and recording existence is, itself, transforming out from under its practitioners — fragile supports, migrating formats, images that outlive their tools. The sector's framing turns the bicentenary from celebration into diagnosis.

Two further sectors extend the range. Digital, curated by Marco de Mutiis, examines how technology changes the production and perception of images. Emergence presents monographic projects by a new generation of artists still finding their place on the international scene. Both are standard Paris Photo infrastructure; both also do real work here, offering the fair's different routes into the bicentenary — persistence of images, fragility of supports, possibility of evolving tools.

What do the institutions bring?

The Centre Pompidou contributes Revealing, a presentation of around one hundred works by nearly thirty historical and contemporary artists, organized around three themes: Making the Image, To Infinity, and Identities. The numbers are concrete; the themes, as yet, are labels. What those theme headings will hold remains to be seen.

Aldeide Delgado curates Elles × Paris Photo, highlighting women artists represented at the fair — a continuation of the programme Delgado has steered in recent editions rather than a one-off gesture.

Photobooks keep their central role. The Book sector, conversations with authors and publishers, signing sessions, and the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards all return. The fair's own framing is right on this point: photography also develops through sequencing, the relationships between pages, and the editorial decisions that turn a pile of images into a publication. The book, arguably the medium's most durable support, is the quiet answer to the Voices sector's anxieties about disappearance.

The bicentenary is the starting point, the fair says — the works and the relationships between them offer the opportunity to consider where the medium goes next. That's a promise of orientation rather than nostalgia. Whether the Grand Palais floor delivers genuine dialogue between the daguerreotype and the digital simulation, or simply adjacency, is the question November will answer.