This year marks 200 years since the invention of photography, a milestone commemorated by a series of exhibitions and presentations at Art Basel Paris and other venues that explore the medium’s evolution and enduring creative impact.

The origins of photography trace back to around 1826, when French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce developed heliography, a process using light-sensitive bitumen applied to a pewter plate. Placing the plate inside a camera obscura, Niépce was able to capture the world’s first permanent photograph — an image of his courtyard exposed over an extended period.

Niépce’s pioneering achievement serves as a starting point for the exhibitions, which showcase photography’s technical and artistic transformations over two centuries. At the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, “Penn & Fashion” presents a focused look at Irving Penn’s work, highlighting his shift from elaborate fashion backdrops to a minimalist approach emphasizing form and personality. The exhibition, running through January 17, features more than 30 images that bookend Penn’s career — from his 1950s haute couture portraits in Paris to his later experiments with color and composition. Vasilios Zatse, deputy director of the Irving Penn Foundation, characterized the exhibit’s final rooms as visually striking and representative of Penn’s legacy.

Meanwhile, the Bourse de Commerce — Pinault Collection hosts “The World According to Penn,” on view until January 10, which includes nearly 450 photographs by Penn spanning portraits, reportage, beauty studies, and still lifes. This exhibition forms part of a larger bicentennial show, “Remember Me,” open through January 18, which features around 700 works by more than 70 photographers across eras, including Gustave Le Gray, Dorothea Lange, and Man Ray. Curated thematically rather than chronologically, the display encourages visitors to consider why different artists have approached similar subjects in varied ways. Matthieu Humery, photography adviser for the Pinault Collection, noted that provoking active engagement and inquiry was central to the exhibition’s design.

At Art Basel Paris itself, several galleries are presenting innovative photographic works that challenge traditional boundaries. London’s Brunette Coleman gallery highlights the English artist Nat Faulkner, whose hybrid analog photography and sculptural practices embrace natural unpredictability. Faulkner allows environmental factors such as light and temperature fluctuations to influence his darkroom processes, resulting in unique tonal shifts and deliberate imperfections like fingerprints and tape marks. Among his new works is a large-scale floral photograph created using a medical camera typically employed for dental and ophthalmologic images; Faulkner layered black-and-white negatives onto color paper over multiple sessions to produce subtle variations.

Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery presents camera-less photographic images by New York-based Taro Masushio. His work explores concepts of queer identity through abstract compositions inspired by Japanese screentones — patterned adhesive sheets commonly used to add shading in manga. Masushio digitally manipulates scanned screentones, then converts the images into negatives developed with chemical processes that mimic daguerreotype aesthetics, producing reflective, sepia-hued photographs infused with iridescent color shifts due to chemical interactions. He emphasized the intentional incorporation of unpredictability and cosmic resonance in his approach.

Berlin’s Schiefe Zähne gallery features the English artist Anna Clegg, whose staged photographs depict a surreal police raid wherein officers wield guitars as weapons, evoking music video imagery and youthful rebellion. Clegg’s body of work, which also includes figurative paintings and photographic still lifes of paper sculptures, engages with themes of personal transgression, violence, sexuality, and commodification within contemporary capitalist society amid global instability.

The bicentennial celebrations also reflect on photography’s changing role in an era of ubiquitous digital images and instant sharing. Humery remarked on the challenge posed by the abundance of casual photography for sustaining appreciation of the medium’s foundational “magic” — the transformative moment when a blank frame becomes a revelation.

Together, these exhibitions highlight photography’s rich history as a tool for capturing and interpreting reality, while also showcasing contemporary artists who continue to expand its possibilities as an art form.