The Palais de Tokyo in Paris opens Photoromance on 21 October 2026, an exhibition devoted to the Ivorian photographer Paul Kodjo. It runs until 14 February 2027 and is presented as his first major solo exhibition in France.
Born in Abidjan in 1939, Kodjo began working there in the early 1960s, moved to Paris in 1967 to study photography and returned to Côte d'Ivoire in 1970. Back home he founded MAMEDIS (Mass Media Service), an agency that brought together photography, cinema and publishing. He died in Abidjan in 2021.
At the heart of the show are his photo novels. From 1971 they appeared in the weekly Ivoire Dimanche: sentimental comedies full of twists, shot in the streets of Abidjan, played by actors and published as serials. The genre came from Italy; Kodjo, one of the first African photographers to take it up, gave it Ivorian faces.
Beyond fiction, he photographed the nightlife, fashion and city life of the prosperous 1960s and 1970s, the years of the so-called Ivorian miracle, and took commissions from bars, nightclubs and fashion designers.
Co-produced with the Rencontres d'Arles, where it was shown this summer under curator Amandine Nana, the exhibition rests on an archive kept alive for more than fifteen years by Les Rencontres du Sud, founded by Ivorian photographer Ananias Léki Dago. Work to preserve Kodjo's negatives began in 2025 with support from UCLA's Modern Endangered Archives Program.
