PARIS—A tout-jeune-chic-Paris opening party for Paris Photo saw designers such as Jean-Paul Gaultier and Karl Lagerfeld (who had two books of photographs on the go) racing round the aisles with the likes of photographers Paolo Roversi and Bettina Rheims in hot pursuit. It was almost a Frieze-force opening . . . but the Prada-and-jeans photo crowd was younger, hipper . . . entry-level with few high-end collectors.

“There’s actually a weird split in the market,” London dealer Michael Hoppen told me from his stand. “A contemporary photograph which might fetch £10,000 here would fetch £40,000 if shown at Basel. Here, a photograph is a photograph. . . . At Basel, contemporary photographs become ‘art’ and fetch much, much higher prices.”

That’s not to say that Hoppen didn’t glean a great deal of high-end interest for works like an exquisite Desiree Dolron portrait, but at the request of the artist/photographer it was available only to a museum.

The “Basel factor” might explain why contemporary work at the show looked much weaker than vintage and mid-century work. But the huge crowds were very obviously not there for big-ticket “art” pix. So what was there for them?

For very early vintage aficionados (who tend to collect Old Master drawings as well), the private New York-dealer Hans P. Kraus Jr., who specializes in the paper negative era, which flourished up until l860, offered an entire exhibition of the work of Roger Fenton, including a telling portrait of Queen Victoria with some of her children. At Ton Peek, from Utrecht, the bargain of the fair was the exquisite vintage photographs of rural scenes by Achille Quinet, priced at 1,250 euros each.

The l920s was still hot. At Galeries Johannes Faber, of Vienna, a luminous series of vintage silver prints of Viennese Deco flappers by Rudolf Koppitz, most taken in l925 as studies of movement, had real depth and Baron de Meyer–ish luminosity.

From the same era came extraordinary early images by Andre Kértész: a whole series of contact prints at the Bruce Silverstein Gallery dating from Kertesz’s formative years in Hungary, l9l3 to l925—a period that the photographer regarded as seminal to his development. These tiny images had the sensuality and fun of Lartigue’s work of the same era.

Constructivism and Modernism were well-represented. At Paris-based Art: Concept a commanding Josef Albers portrait of El Lissitzky had great Constructivist resonance, and if you collect photographs as witnesses of history, then Willy Michel’s Photomatons, from l939-l945, at Bernard Dudoignon Photographies showed the photographer as self-portraitist with such giants of the pre-War French intellectual scene as Blaise Cendrars, Colette, Abel Gance, Reynaldo Hahn, Max Jacob and Paul Valery.

But it was the mid-century work from America and from the Cologne school that looked strongest; Stephen Shore, Lewis Baltz, Mitch Epstein and Joel Meyerowitz inspired the Dusseldorf School—the Bechers, Gursky, et al. Shore’s El Paso Street, El Paso, Texas (l975) at Edwynn Houk Gallery would be a great image to own and hang beside a Gursky. Gallery Luisotti showed Lewis Baltz’s Corona del Mar (l971), a subtle gelatin silver print (very Becher-esque) and Mitch Epstein’s Chalmette Battlefield Louisiana (l976) C-print was at Galerie Thomas Zander.

And contemporary? Sadly, very, very déja-vu: sub-LaChapelle, sub-Sugimoto, sub you-name-them . . . derivative, but sometimes fun. Like Gursky or Sugimoto on acid, as one observer put it to me, was Raoul Belinchon’s series Patio de Butacas–large-scale neon Cibachromes of theater interiors at T 20, one of the Spanish galleries exhibiting this year.

So . . . from l860 to today, lots of choice at Paris Photo, but few contemporary stand-outs; dealers told me that this year’s show was a little softer than last year’s. My favorite? A subtle study of a bomber that looked like a Cubist lily in flight, labeled American War Photograph—close observation revealed it to be by Edward Steichen.