Every Booth at the 2013 AIPAD Photography Show, Part 6 of 6

Start here for Part 1 of this series. It provides some background and explanation for what's going on in these lists.

Andrea Meislin Gallery (here): Angela Strassheim, $12000. Strassheim has recently joined the stable at the gallery. This image of a young girl cocooned in her interior lit blanket fort is wonderfully protected and vulnerable.

Vision Neil Folberg Gallery (here): Georg Kuettinger, $11000. A massive broad landscape of stitched together tire swipes.

Richard Moore Photographs (here): Johan Hagemeyer, $12000. Another lesser known but worthy Modernist, represented by a well crafted image of city buildings.

Keith De Lellis Gallery (here): Margaret Bourke-White, $18000. I think of 1930 as near the beginning of Bourke-White's professional career, so it was exciting to see this early shimmering airplane hangar study from that year.

Joel Soroka Gallery (here): Gyorgy Kepes, $8000. I had no idea Gyorgy Kepes made any works past the late 1940s, so it is was a total shock to see a group of large scale 1980s Polaroid still life constructions (in color no less) in this booth.

Halsted Gallery (here): Julia Margaret Cameron, $11500. Another ethereal Cameron portrait, very reasonably priced given its quality (refreshingly the norm with the friendly Halsteds).

PPOW (here): David Wojnarowicz, $25000. Vintage prints from Wojnarowicz' Arthur Rimbaud in New York series are pretty rare, so this gem is worth seeking out.

Higher Pictures (here): K8 Hardy, $8000. This booth was a solo show of Hardy's Position series, mixing photograms and self-portraits into arresting hybrids. I was able to flip through the full body of work (in a box on the table) and I came away extremely impressed by Hardy's originality and range. This particular image reminded me of Claude Cahun, but in a harsher and distinctly modern guise.

Stephen Daiter Gallery (here): Harry Callahan, $60000. This image just left me shaking my head in awe. What an astounding, astonishing photograph. Stunning is an overused word in art writing, but this one left me slack-jawed and truly stunned by its brilliance.

Nailya Alexander Gallery (here): Pentti Sammallahti, $1100. I liked the gentle, natural balance in this image, the cross of the broken tree limb and the flanking silhouettes of small birds.

Danziger Gallery (here): Susan Derges, $15000. I've always been a fan of Susan Derges' River Taw photograms, so I'm intrigued to see her returning to similar subject matter, albeit now using digital technologies.

Bruce Silverstein Gallery (here): Jaromir Funke, $175000. This was one of the most impressive prints I saw in the entire fair. Cut paper folds intertwined like staircases, a symphony in subtle white.

Hans P. Kraus Jr. Inc. (here): William Henry Fox Talbot, POR. What better way to end this summary than by going back to the beginning with a lovely plant photogram by William Henry Fox Talbot. Even when we bustle and rush to find the next new thing in photography, it's important to be reminded that the very old still has the power to take our breath away.

Every Booth at the 2013 AIPAD Photography Show, Part 5 of 6

Start here for Part 1 of this series. It provides some background and explanation for what's going on in these lists.

798 Photo Gallery (here): Liu Xiaofang, $3900. A mysterious lightbulb on a long cord dangling down from the sky toward Liu's signature little girl.

Gallery 339 (here): William Larson, $4000. I've always thought that the panoramic motion series nudes by Larson were smart, so it was nice to see a few hung together for intimate viewing.

Throckmorton Fine Art (here): Edward Weston, $45000. This woven palm from his time in Mexico is a great example of the artist paring back to the simplicity of form.

Klompching Gallery (here): Helen Sear, $3500. This image combines the back of a woman's head with an effervescent explosion of cherry blossoms. What's hard to see unless you get up close is that the two are overlaid together using striated hand drawn lines and erasures which allow the bottom image to show through the top one. I like its effort to bring the hand of the artist into the practice of digital picture making.

Fifty One Fine Art Photography (here): Malick Sidibé, $20000. This cardboard display page brings together a group of Sidibé's party pictures and portraits, ready for easy choosing by customers.

Sasha Wolf Gallery (here): Christine Osinski, $1500. This image has an easy going 1980s feel, with boys too young to drive hanging out in a funky car.

Eric Franck Fine Art (here): Tom Wood, $8000. The series of Wood's bar scenes on the outside wall of Eric Franck's booth were my favorite new discovery of the fair. Nearly every image collapses two or three vignettes into a single frame. Funny, poignant, and a little bit too real for comfort.

Picture Photo Space (here): Eikoh Hosoe, $8000. Excellent images from Hosoe's Embrace aren't easy to come by, but this is one of them. The kind folks from the gallery also unwrapped a first edition of the book which was hiding under the table, adding to my general enjoyment of their booth.

Rick Wester Fine Art (here): Duane Michals, $8000. A classic, scale demolishing Michals series.

Henry Feldstein (no website): Weegee, $15000. Four top hatted gentlemen, seen with Weegee's glaring flash.

Julie Saul Gallery (here): Alejandra Laviada, $3600. I like the two dimensionality of this sculptural construction; its depth is removed entirely, leaving blocks of color, almost like a Sean Scully painting.

Catherine Couturier Gallery (here): Peter Keetman, $6000. There was very little 1950s German photography at this year's fair. This linear Keetman of frozen crisscrossed electric wires was one exception.

Kopeikin Gallery (here): Alejandro Cartagena, $2100 each. While a typology of pickup trucks has probably been done many times before, one looking straight down at sleeping construction and landscape workers in the beds is certainly a different take on the genre. Each bed is like a Joseph Cornell box of bodies and gear.

William L. Schaeffer/Photographs (no website): William Bell, $2500. The front and back of a gunshot wound, seen with the help of a mirror.

Continue to Part 6 here.

Every Booth at the 2013 AIPAD Photography Show, Part 4 of 6

Start here for Part 1 of this series. It provides some background and explanation for what's going on in these lists.

Weinstein Gallery (here): Vera Lutter, $12000. This image (and the others in the series on the wall nearby) has some visual kinship with Kertész' famous picture, but introduces Lutter's own signature reversed out aesthetic to the composition.

David Zwirner (here): James Welling, $20000. Welling was fortunate to receive a solo show in such a prominently placed booth, right in front of the fair entrance. A pair of these stark black and white abstractions (that look almost like industrial girders) hung on the outside wall.

Catherine Edelman Gallery (here): Keliy Anderson-Staley, $1000-4400 each. This installation of modern tintype portraits was striking and personal. Proof that the use of an antique process need not seem old timey or preciously retro.

Weston Gallery (here): Paul Strand, $65000. Down in the weeds Strand is always worth a deliberate inspection.

 

Charles Isaacs Photographs, Inc. (here): Julia Margaret Cameron, POR. An iconic portrait, one of the true greats in the history of the medium. Rich, haunting, and penetrating. I didn't need to ask the price.

Laurence Miller Gallery (here): Ray K. Metzker, $125000. While nearly all of Metzker's composites are astonishing, this car and lamp image layers light and shadow into a gentle rhythm.

Gallery 19/21 (here): Mario Giacomelli, $9000. This looking straight down image by Giacomelli recalls Moholy-Nagy, with buildings flattened into tiny squares.

Paul M. Hertzmann Inc. (here): Imogen Cunningham, $150000. This was the best Cunningham floral at the fair. Irises aren't always exciting, but this one has a richness and luminosity that is extraordinary.

Staley-Wise Gallery (here): Richard Avedon, $30000. How to add motion to an otherwise static composition - the lively poof of Jean Shrimpton's hair.

Contemporary Works/Vintage Works (here): Raoul Ubac, POR. I haven't seen many Ubac prints so it was a treat to see this clashing, overlapped, solarized nude, the bodies seemingly all cut up and smashed together in a chaotic muddle.

Stephen Bulger Gallery (here): André Kertész, $4800, $35000, and $4800. An important reminder to keep those artist greeting cards.

Brancolini Grimaldi (here): Heidi Specker, £10000. Rough rock walls, flattened into texture and edges, or a hint of Siskind in a modern form.

ClampArt (here): Mark Morrisroe, $27500. Morrisroe's sandwich negative tribute to Diane Arbus, a lonely bird in a murky fog.

Robert Mann Gallery (here): Mike Mandel, $4000 each. A fun series of car window portraits, full of goofy faces and genuine warmth.

Continue to Part 5 here.

Every Booth at the 2013 AIPAD Photography Show, Part 3 of 6

Start here for Part 1 of this series. It provides some background and explanation for what's going on in these lists.

Alan Klotz Gallery (here): Josef Sudek, $14000. Not every Sudek table top still life is as active as this one with its shuddering multiplied egg reflection.

Michael Shapiro Photographs (here): Lewis Baltz, $28000. Prices for vintage Baltz prints have sure come up quite a bit in recent years, but this image is the kind I appreciate most. I love the circles on the left as an addition to the rectangular geometries, all executed in middle grey with a dash to dark black at the bottom.

Photo Gallery International (here): Yasuhiro Ishimoto, $7400. This fiery Ishimoto abstraction reminded me of a Morris Louis Color Field painting.

Galerie f5,6 (here): Anne Schwalbe, $2500. Each of the Schwalbe images on display was dominated by a single subtle color hue. This pink wall was quietly refined.

Peter Fetterman Gallery (here): Sebastiao Salgado, $50000. This huge print was shown on the exterior wall, the river at the bottom of the mountain valley shining like a white line.

James Hyman Gallery (here): Gustave Le Gray, $35000. I didn't realize Le Gray had made images in Egypt, so this stone gate was an unexpected surprise.

Robert Klein Gallery (here): Francesca Woodman, $55000. This elegant image is actually a video still from one of Woodman's film projects. I like the mix of torn paper and revealed body.

Bonni Benrubi Gallery (here): Stephane Couturier, 11000€. The immediately identifiable architecture of Brasilia, reconsidered via interlocked image fragment puzzle pieces.

Barry Singer Gallery (here): Lotte Jacobi, $6500. A hallmark of high contrast, unbalanced composition, the big black circle offsetting the oval face and its defined lips.

Hyperion Press Limited (here): Man Ray, NFS. A tiny print, but still impressive.

Scheinbaum & Russek Ltd. (here): Walter Chappell, $3000. Carrot tops that seem to glow with internal light.

Steven Kasher Gallery (here): Irving Penn, $75000. There were plenty of Penns at AIPAD, but this one was my favorite. I like the twisted silhouettes passing through the glass and wine bottle.

Robert Burge/20th Century Photographs (here): D.W. Mellor, $3500 each. A theme and variation sonata of ovals and waved forms in this grid of abstractions.

Continue to Part 4 here.