Visitors check out the Paris Photo event in Paris, France. Part exhibition and part trade show, 107 exhibitors from 19 countries are participating. (Emmanuel Nguyen Ngoc/Paris Photo)

One of the highlights of the cultural calendar in Paris is le Mois de la Photo (photography month), which happens every November. During that month, art galleries across the city show photos and Parisians flock to the Carousel du Louvre, a vast underground exhibition space attached to the famous museum, for the festival’s showpiece international fair: Paris Photo. Part art exhibition and part trade show, it’s a mecca for collectors, curators and aficionados who come with an eye for trends and vintage prints and an ear for what sells, and for how much.

This being Paris, my first steps into the fair this year involved being knocked into by several non-apologetic Parisians in well-tailored coats. Before me were 107 exhibitors from 19 countries, and throngs of people circulating at trade-show speed.

“It was like going to planet Mars. [The Japanese] had a fear of coming here, and they insisted that they all stay together. It’s very much island mentality. But the good news is that the books are selling really well. There are a lot of great discoveries to be made.”—Guillaume Piens

I wondered how the Japanese are coping with the Parisian crowds. This year, Japan is guest of honour at Paris Photo: 54 Japanese galleries and publishers occupy central space in the crowded Carousel. Many of them, I learned, had never exhibited outside their country. What’s more, despite the stereotype about the Japanese and their cameras, the first dedicated photography museum there only opened in 1988.

“We’re experiencing everything for the first time,” says Sawako Fukai, manager of Tokyo’s G/P Gallery, one of a handful of galleries that exhibit young and emerging Japanese photographers. Her polka dot scarf and genial smile belied a serious agenda. “Our mission is to introduce new photographers and to expand the field of Japanese photography,” she said. “But there aren’t many critics in Japan who can talk about contemporary photography, and only a few collectors. Promoting it is interesting, but it’s tough.”

I was told to look out for the work by better-known contemporary Japanese photographers like Noyuboshi Araki, who made his name with taboo-breaking nudes and bondage scenes, and Daido Moriyama, whose blurry, black-and-white Tokyo street scenes are influencing the younger generation.

At Paris Photo this year, G/P Gallery is exhibiting three appropriately experimental photographers: Yumiko Utsu, Taisuke Koyama and Masayuki Shioda. Utsu does cartoonishly distorted plants and animals; Koyama shoots found objects made to look like faces; and Shioda creates topographic-looking photographs smeared with paint. But the prints hanging on the walls of G/P Gallery’s booth were just an overture. Fukai was keen to direct me to stacks of beautifully bound books of the artists’ work piled on a small table.

In Japan, photographic images often appear in books before they're exhibited in galleries. (Emmanuel Nguyen Ngoc/Paris Photo)

“Books are central to Japanese photography, much more than they are here,” said Guillaume Piens, artistic director of Paris Photo. “It really is a break from western culture, where for us, art books are the memory, the archive of a show. But in Japan, where they have a taste for beautiful printing, these books are works of art in their own right. What we’re seeing is that photographs most often appear in books even before they are exhibited.” Piens said that seminal Japanese photo books are beginning to gain attention, like Eikoh Hosoe’s Killed by Roses, a collection of erotic black-and-white photography from the 1960s.

We spoke in a rare moment of calm for Piens, who has faced an uphill organizational battle in bringing the Japanese exhibitors to Paris. He was still co-ordinating their stay on the busy morning I talked to him. When the Japanese showed up without international credit cards, Piens was forced to seek a special line of credit at the only Japanese bank in Paris.

“It was like going to planet Mars. They had a fear of coming here, and they insisted that they all stay together,” Piens said between sips of Perrier in a quiet corner of the Carousel. “It’s very much island mentality. But the good news is that the books are selling really well. There are a lot of great discoveries to be made. I’m sure that the show is going to be a big boost to Japanese photography.”

Of course it matters who exactly is doing the discovering. Piens didn’t expect many of the influential American museum curators to attend the festival, given the global economic crisis. And yet they appeared to have shown up in record numbers. Robert Mann, the New York gallery owner, told Piens that he had never seen so many important American curators in one room.

Vintage prints such as Diane Arbus's Albino Sword Swallower at a Carnival are sought by collectors. (Estate of Diane Arbus/ Courtesy Robert Mann Gallery, New York/Paris Photo)

The credit crunch didn’t seem to impede private collectors, either, or diminish their interest in the more expensive vintage prints, which are a big draw at Paris Photo. I observed one private buyer slowly nod his head as he studied a rare print by the Weimar portrait photographer August Sander; it was selling for $120,000 US.

“We don’t have one yet,” the man mumbled, and then booked an appointment with the gallery owner. I also spied the heavily bearded French soccer star Eric Cantona marching to the exit with an unknown print stowed under his arm. In the Bruce Silverstein Gallery booth, Elizabeth Shank, director of the New York gallery, showed me a Diane Arbus ($325,000) and a Man Ray ($125,000), both of which she expected would sell, if not at the fair, then shortly after.

Not everyone was in a buying mood, however. “You come here to look if you are a serious collector,” said Edward, a Swiss businessman who preferred not to give his last name. We met in the Carousel café where Edward drank whiskey, rested his eyes and spoke about his particular interest in photographs of the 1950s. “But Paris is the most expensive place to buy prints,” he said. “And besides, I’m more interested in buying negatives, because that is unique and cannot be replicated. But they won’t sell you those.”

The fair’s corporate sponsor, BMW, which recently announced slumping sales and massive layoffs, showed no signs of the current recession. A BMW representative awarded the fair’s top prize to Chinese photographer Yao Lu. Lu’s pictures of traditional Chinese landscapes are created by digitally manipulating photographs of mounds of rubbish. Lu’s acceptance speech was gracious but drawn out, as each sentiment was translated from Chinese into French and then into English. Many of us who had been on our feet all day couldn’t help but eye the waiters as they prepared flutes of champagne and intricate hors d’oeuvres.

Chinese photographer Yao Lu stands beside one of his prints, a traditional Chinese landscape created by digitally manipulating mounds of rubbish. (Emmanuel Nguyen Ngoc/Paris Photo)

That evening, at a party at Serge Plantereux, a small bookshop tucked away in one of the pretty 19^th-century shopping arcades of the 2^nd Arrondissement, I took an unscientific survey of people’s impressions of this year’s fest. Stefanie, a German photographer, enjoyed the work of contemporary American photographer Alec Soth, but she was surprised at the price tag for a print: $9,000. The Last Days of W, Soth’s series of weary American life, hung next to prints by Walker Evans, Robert Mapplethorpe and Irving Penn.

The party was comparatively modest: books of photography were sold for 30 euros. We ate kidney beans and paté and filled plastic cups with red wine from the box. A Norwegian photographer in his mid-20s told me that he had come to Paris Photo to promote his work to galleries. He carried copies of a self-published book of his work in his rucksack.

“I can exhibit,” he said. “But how long will it last? Two, three weeks? In a specific location? A book means I can reach a little bit further.”

The following morning, I strolled by a long line of people waiting to enter the fair. Among them were Londoners Edward and Susan Kinsey, a casually dressed couple in their mid-40s who collect black-and-white photography. “This is our fourth year that we’ve come down from London,” said Edward Kinsey. “We haven’t bought anything yet, and probably won’t, because we can buy works at auction in the U.K. for a third less than they would sell here.”

“But,” he said, summing up the excitement as the line began to move, “we come because this is a unique opportunity to see the work of major, iconic photographers — right close up.”

Le Mois de la Photo runs in Paris until the end of November.

Jakob von Baeyer is a Canadian journalist living in London, England.