Breakfast with friends rarely feels like an event. Then someone takes a photograph, and years later you’re looking at the way a friend held their coffee cup as if it might tell you something you’d forgotten. That leap from the ordinary to the oddly moving is the territory of Wild Ember Orchestra, a group show bringing together eighteen emerging photographers from France and the United States. It opens this Thursday, 12 November, at La Montgolfière in Paris, just as Paris Photo week gets under way.
The show began with a fairly simple exchange. Roxane Moreau Elkaim, who founded the Paris-based photography platform Dans le Bain after two years in New York, invited Jesse Feinman of the independent publisher Pomegranate Press to collaborate on her curatorial debut. He sent over a selection of eleven artists. She came back with seven French photographers whose work she thought might strike up a conversation with his picks. As Moreau Elkaim tells us, it was “an invitation that became a conversation, and a conversation that gradually developed that intimate dialogue”.
As for the title, Feinman admits that the language around Pomegranate Press “is oftentimes very theatrical and teeters slightly into absurdism”. Fair enough. But the orchestra part makes sense when you hear how he talks about editing photographs. “I sometimes think of images as songs, symphonies, that kind of thing, especially when they’re in dialogue with one another or placed in succession,” he says. The ember, meanwhile, is his way of describing “the relentlessly romantic disposition most of the works featured have”. Think of the emotional weight an embrace can carry, or how much a familiar object can give away about the person who keeps it.
That attention to intimacy takes different forms across the line-up. There’s Myles Loftin, whose wider practice includes portraits of members of the Royal House of LaBeija, and Lucia Bell-Epstein, Marcus Maddox, Grade Solomon and Chris Llerins, who have all appeared in Pomegranate Press’s group catalogue Breathless in Glowing Air. Cole Barash, Brian Chorski and Yana Yatsuk are also in the show, alongside Sarah Balhadère, Allyssa Heuze, Mathieu Richer Mamousse, Clémentine Passet, Tanguy Sergheraert and Charlotte Yonga. For Feinman, the connections came down to “the way in which quiet feelings of discovery and love and loss and hope and care kind of percolate across the images”.
There’s another reason to stage this exchange during one of the busiest weeks in the photography calendar. Moreau Elkaim sees a gap between the work that circulates at Paris Photo and the breadth of what photographers are actually making, particularly those working closer to documentary. “I wanted to create space for a wider and more diverse understanding of contemporary photography,” she says, “bringing together artists whose work deserves just as much attention, regardless of their position within the art market or gallery world.” Feinman puts the pleasure of doing that in simpler terms. The invitation was a chance “to put some people I love into the same room and to challenge myself to make sense of all of the parts”.
That room is open to everyone. The opening reception runs from 7 to 11 pm on Thursday 12 November, and the exhibition is free to visit at La Montgolfière in the 10th arrondissement until 8 January 2027. There’ll be Pomegranate Press photobooks and prints for sale, too, in case there’s a photograph you’d like to spend a little longer with.
The exhibition Wild Ember Orchestra is open to the public from 12 November 2026 to 8 January 2027 at La Montgolfière, Paris.
Allyssa Heuze
Anthony Wilson
Chris Llerins
Grade Solomon
Mathieu Richer Mamousse
Marcus Maddox
Myles Loftin
Rina Mintz
Tanguy Sergheraert
Yana Yatsuk
