The Maison Européenne de la Photographie is a permanent gallery in the Hotel Henault de Cantobre (built in 1706) in the Rue de Fourcy in central Paris. Owned by the city of Paris, it opened as a gallery devoted solely to photography in 1985 and the current director Simon Baker was appointed in 2018, having previously worked as Senior Curator (International Art - Photography) at Tate Modern in London. He has now initiated a programme aiming to cover a diverse range of contemporary photography. The main feature exhibition when I visited in November, was the work of London based photographer Hassan Hajjaj, who had emigrated there with his parents from Larache in Morocco, when he was aged thirteen.This was an extensive exhibition featuring some of his earlier black and white and hand coloured monochrome prints but much of the space was devoted to his large scale almost life size vividly colourful portraits of his friends and colleagues from a wide variety of artistic backgrounds. The other really striking feature drawing from his background was his imaginative use of highly stylised frames featuring tins of food, canned drinks, sauce bottles or bobbins of thread.There is a strong thread of ironic humour running through his work but also a real sense of his pride in the communities he works in and his desire to see them represented fairly, in the positive light they deserve. There was a lot of excellent photography to see as running concurrently, the gallery was also showing some work by the female Moroccan photographers Zahrin Kahlo and Lamia Naji, with as a bonus a small selection of monochrome prints in a basement gallery by Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keita (both from Mali).www.mep-fr.orgwww.bjp-online.com/2019/10/hassan-hajjaj/