Cairo gallery TINTERA moves into Paris Photo's Main Sector, 12 to 15 November

TINTERA, the Cairo gallery that shows nothing but photography, is taking a bigger stand at the world's best known photography fair. This November it joins the Main Sector of Paris Photo at the Grand Palais for the first time, a year after it made its debut in the fair's smaller Voices section. The gallery says the move makes it the first gallery from Egypt to take part in the fair's principal section.

Paris Photo runs from 12 to 15 November, and this year's edition is built around 200 years of photography. TINTERA is bringing three artists from three generations, all of them people who treat a photograph as something to paint over, cut apart and put back together rather than a finished print.

The first is Bernard Guillot, the French artist who lived in Cairo from 1977 and photographed the city for decades. His hand-painted prints sit somewhere between record and memory, and the gallery is showing pieces from his long Cairo series, including City of the Dead and Hotel Maffet Astoria. The second is the Cairo-born artist Nermine Hammam, who layers photographs with drawing, digital collage and hand colouring. Her works from the series A'aru and Eschaton move through Alexandria's beaches, soldiers and sunbathers, using ordinary pictures to ask questions about memory, masculinity and identity. The third is the Cairo-based Ibrahim Ahmed, who cuts up self-portraits and pictures from his father's family albums and weaves them back together, looking at family memory and the identities people inherit.

TINTERA opened in Cairo in 2019 and works only with photography, both contemporary and historical work connected to Egypt. Its programme mixes exhibitions, research and long collaborations with artists and their estates, and more than 23 artists now work with the gallery.

For Cairo's art crowd, the fair is a chance to see three local names in front of the collectors and museums that shape the photography market. Paris Photo sells its tickets online on the fair's own website; anyone not travelling can follow the presentation through the gallery's Instagram, @tintera_art, and visit its Cairo space, where the same artists show regularly.