Paris Photo: Summer Wagner

Paris Photo
Booth F07
12–15 November 2026
Grand Palais, 3 avenue du Général Eisenhower, 75008 Paris

For Paris Photo 2026, Nguyen Wahed presents a solo booth by Los Angeles-based photographer Summer Wagner. Wagner stages quiet, dreamlike scenes with family, friends and herself across the American landscape, at a moment when images arrive faster than we can believe them. The works ask what it still means to make a photograph, and to stay still long enough to be truly seen.

Artist statement

Over the last three years, we've collectively succumbed to the tsunami of cultural and technological changes that have thrown image-making into an existential crisis. First, we were inundated with images, then we were challenged with questioning at every instance whether or not those images are even real. Now we ask ourselves, did it ever even matter in the first place?

As someone who makes images for a living, the drudge of creating in this era is felt deeply. What could I possibly create that would scratch an itch unscratched when we are already being dragged through the gravel daily, our skin already raw and open?

Watching the War is a 30 second single exposure captured while literally watching war unfold from my phone in Zion National Park. Ivy Street is a portrait of my little sister and her two friends visiting my home on their college spring break. Guard One is a self portrait taken off the side of the road in the Los Padres National Forest. Rather than trying to conceptualize scenes from the ground up, I let the scenes in The Pulse of Grass and Screen find themselves and unfold intuitively. I was just there to see them, to bring an imaginative element to people and objects in our everyday lives that are already there.

Creating, whether the images are seen or not, is a salve to the rawness of this unknowable, untouchable crisis of a world facing such apocalyptic stakes. Of the 14 images in the exhibition, 5 are self portraits, the rest are scenes set with family and friends created earnestly as rituals to summon some kind of authentic feeling, a feeling of being tethered to the body, to one another, to our phones, our vapes, ideas and identities that form us right now.

I, or someone I loved, touched the grass, felt its pulse, and remained still enough for a moment to be truly seen.

Summer Wagner, 2026