Paris Photo 2026: a guide for galleries and photographers

What Paris Photo is

Paris Photo is the leading international fair for photography. It takes over the Grand Palais about three weeks after Art Basel Paris, so the Paris art press is already primed.

Why photographers are hard for AI to read

Photography websites are mostly images and very little text. AI systems learn about artists from text. A photographer with a strong portfolio site and a two-line bio can be close to invisible in AI answers.

Names add to the problem. Many photographers share a name with someone better documented. Without clear signals, an assistant merges the two.

Before the fair

• Write a full bio for each photographer: where they are based, the series they are known for, the institutions that hold their work.
• Caption every image in text, not only inside the image file: title, series, year, process, edition size.
• Give each series its own page with a short statement. Series names are how collectors search.
• Add an llms.txt file to your site so AI systems get a plain-text summary of your artists.

During and after

• Add Paris Photo 2026 to each photographer's exhibition history on your site.
• Publish the works shown, with edition information, on a booth page that stays live.
• Follow up with every journalist and curator who visited within a week.

How AI describes the artists on your stand

Collectors and advisers now research artists in ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI answers before and after Paris Photo. Established names get confident, accurate summaries. Mid-career and emerging artists often get thin answers, the wrong medium, or a different person with the same name.

Test it yourself. Ask two or three AI assistants who each artist on your stand is, what they make and where they have shown. Note what is missing or wrong. That gap is what a collector sees when they look the artist up on the train home.

We are measuring this at scale in The AI Art Index, our study of how AI talks about contemporary artists. If you represent artists showing at Paris Photo, we can run a free report on how AI describes them.

Questions

When is Paris Photo 2026?

Paris Photo runs from 12 to 15 November 2026 at the Grand Palais, Paris. It opens 1pm to 8pm daily and closes at 7pm on 15 November.

How many exhibitors are at Paris Photo 2026?

More than 200 exhibitors from over 30 countries.

Why do AI assistants get photographers wrong?

They learn from text, and photography sites carry very little of it. Thin bios, missing captions and shared names lead to vague or merged answers. Full bios, text captions and one page per series fix most of it.