Every Booth at the 2013 AIPAD Photography Show, Part 1 of 6

In direct defiance of all the art fair haters out there, I will readily admit to thoroughly enjoying the annual AIPAD Photography Show here in New York. For a handful of intense days, it brings  a significant portion of the subculture we call fine art photography into one single expansive room, mixing the hard nosed wrangling of buying and selling with the lively sociability of a huge cocktail party. For me, it's one of the few times during the year when I can catch up with out of town dealers, collectors, curators, artists, and other photography world folk, all while scouring each and every booth for things that would fit into our own personal collection. It's a busy exercise in switching hats, from collector to critic and back again.

Walking the halls of any art fair is an exhausting overload of sensory inputs, but when every booth is filled with art of the same medium like it is at AIPAD, it's even easier for eyes to get glassy. At least for me, after a dozen booths or so, the art turns into a seemingly endless rushing river that flows by with such force and velocity that most of it turns into a blur. It's just not possible to process every single image with care and attention, so my brain clicks over to pattern matching mode and looks for outliers that catch my glance for one reason or another, letting the rest happily drift by. In previous years, I have tallied up each and every photograph in select booths, generally covering about half the fair in exhaustive detail. This year, I have opted for a different, more inclusive, and less data intensive strategy; instead of endlessly counting and tabulating, I vowed to select one single image that I found of particular interest from each and every exhibitor booth (sorry AXA). What I was looking for was something exciting, surprising, unexpected, or astonishing, a search for the non-obvious among the greatest hits, the Bill Brandts unearthed to cash in on the MoMA exhibit, and the second tier Irving Penns. This was actually trickier than I expected, as in a number of booths, the embarrassment of riches on offer made choosing only one print downright painful, while in a few others, I struggled to find even one image that I could reasonably highlight. So with a nod to Ed Ruscha, I give you Every Booth at the 2013 AIPD Photography Show, a rambling story of 81 photographs in 81 booths, told in six parts.

The organization of these posts is straightforward: gallery name (and link), artist name, price (sometimes already sold), some comments or logic as appropriate, followed by the image itself. The list follows my path through the fair, starting left from the entry and wandering up and down the aisles, eventually returning to the entrance once again from the other side.

Edwynn Houk Gallery (here): Valérie Belin, $34000. This huge image came from a series I hadn't seen before. The flowers are actually quite painterly, as though they have been outlined. I like the way the foreground and background shift back and forth.

Howard Greenberg Gallery (here): John Vanderpant, $6500. I think Vanderpant is one of those lesser known, generally under appreciated Modernists that deserves some more attention. This one is just gorgeous.

Daniel Blau (here): Robert Wiles, $4500. Blau had an entire booth of press photography. While a bit gruesome, I thought this woman smashed onto the roof of a car was quite elegant.

Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery (here): Ola Kolehmainen, $17000. I'm a fan of Kolehmainen's work, especially when it pushes towards abstraction like this one.

Lisa Sette Gallery (here): Damion Berger, $25000. This booth was a solo show of Berger's Black Powder series of firework explosions. I preferred the frenetic, all-over quality of this image to the ones that were more recognizable.

SAGE Paris (here): Karl Blossfeldt, $85000. This was the best Blossfeldt at the show. Hard to beat.

Lee Gallery (here): Joe Deal, $25000. While all of Deal's backyard scenes are conceptually interesting, only a handful are as visually strong as this one.

L. Parker Stephenson Photographs (here): Sherril Schell, $22000. Very few Schell's find their way into the market and this one throttled me from twenty paces. Classic New York Modernism.

Gitterman Gallery (here): Roger Fenton, $32000. A vintage print of a photography history book classic, The Valley of the Shadow of Death. Great to see up close, hiding on an interior side wall.

Gary Edwards Gallery (here): Juan Laurent, $2500. Bridge pictures have the kind of linear formality that always catches my eye. This latticed viaduct is from Spain.

Scott Nichols Gallery (here): William Garnett, $35000. If you look closely in this aerial image, beyond the straight geometries of the fields, you can see a line of tiny men picking the cotton. I'm consistently impressed by Garnett's work and always wonder why I don't see more of it.

Robert Koch Gallery (here): Brassaï, $60000. After I commented on a Brassaï nude that was on the wall, this one was unearthed from a box. He didn't made many nudes, so it's always a treat to see even one.

Robert Morat Galerie (here): Christian Patterson, $4000. I enjoyed both the tangle of wires and the tremendous color tonality in this print.

Continue to Part 2 here.

The Helsinki School - Seven Approaches @Wolkowitz

JTF (just the facts): A group show containing a total of 27 contemporary works by 7 different artists from the Helsinki School, hung in the entry, hallway, and back gallery spaces. (Installation shots at right.)

The following photographers have been included in the show; the number of images on view and their details are as follows:

• Joonas Alhava: 4 c-prints, Diasec mounted, all from 2006, either 74x59 or 49x40, all in editions of 5.
• Hannu Karjalainen: 3: c-prints, Diasec mounted, all from 2009, each 59x47, in editions of 5.
• Pertti Kekarainen: 2 c-prints, Diasec mounted, from 2004 and 2008, 77x49 and 77x71 respectively, both in editions of 5.
• Ola Kolehmainen: 2 c-prints, Diasec mounted, from 2006 and 2009, both roughly 80x105, in editions of 6.
• Anni Leppälä: 13 c-prints on aluminum, made between 2007 and 2010, in various sizes ranging from 8x11 to 43x32 (hung as a group salon style), all in editions of 7.
• Niko Luoma: 1 c-print, Diasec mounted, made in 2009, 67x55, in an edition of 5.
• Susanna Majuri: 2 c-prints, Diasec mounted, made in 2009, each 35x53, in editions of 5.

Comments/Context: In the past few years, I've read quite a bit about the high quality contemporary photographers coming out of the Helsinki School in Finland, but until this show (and its siblings at the Armory and AIPAD), there hasn't been any real opportunity to see the work in person in New York, at least in any significant quantity.

While it is perhaps foolish to attempt to draw sweeping conclusions from such a small sample of photographers, my takeaway is that the Helsinki School has absorbed many of the important lessons from Düsseldorf (large prints with glossy Diasec mounting, leading to a tangible "art" object quality on the wall, rather than the trappings of "old" photography), and applied them in a style less rooted in rigorous documentation, but altogether more loosely conceptual in nature. To the extent there are people or buildings in these images, they have been placed there with precision and premeditation; there are no "decisive moments" or chance events happening here. Each project is built on a foundation of challenging ideas: careful and tightly controlled explorations of photography and its relationship to perception, space, light, storytelling, and memory.

I particularly enjoyed Niko Luoma's image from his series Symmetrium, with its dense intersecting plaid of red and green lines, as once again (see the discussion of Thomas Ruff's recent show here), we are seeing a photographer using mathematical systems to consider the non-traditional boundaries of composition. And while I have written about Ola Kolehmainen's architectural images before (here), I think I saw and understood them more clearly in person; his work seems to be evolving away from crisp documentation of patterns toward something more minimal and obscure, using blurs and color to create more amorphous abstractions.

In truth, I found something of interest in all the bodies of work on display, from Joonas Ahlava's silhouettes to Pertti Kekarainen's spotted spaces, and from Hannu Karjarlainen's people covered in rubbery paint to Anni Leppälä's fragments of childhood memories and Susanna Majuri's ambiguous narratives. We see so much of a certain kind of American contemporary photography on display in this city (particularly narrative and emotive portraiture) that I think this work from the Helsinki School feels surprisingly fresh and different, with a bit more European (or Scandinavian) distance and intellectualism. As a sampler of photography with an alternate point of view, it's a terrific palate cleanser.

Collector's POV: The prices for the works in this show are as follows:

• Joonas Ahlava: $10000 for the smaller print, $19000 for the larger ones
• Hannu Karjalainen: $12500 or $13500
• Pertti Kekarainen: $14000 or $18000
• Ola Kolehmainen: $25000 or $31000
• Anni Leppälä: a range from $3000 to $6500
• Niko Luoma: $14000
• Susanna Majuri: $9500 each

While a few of Ola Kolehmainen's prints have begun to trickle into the secondary markets, for the most part, the work of these artists is not yet consistently available at auction, so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors in the short term.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Helsinki School (here) and TaiK (here)
• Helsinki School books by Hatje Cantz (here)

The only artist sites I could find were (add the others in the comments as appropriate):

• Anni Leppälä artist site (here)
• Niko Luoma artist site (here)

The Helsinki School - Seven Approaches
Through April 3rd

Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery
505 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011

Book: Ola Kolehmainen, Fraction Abstraction Recreation

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2007 by Hatje Cantz. 108 pages, with 61 color images. Includes texts and essays by Martina Fuchs, Mark Gisbourne, and Timothy Persons. (Cover shot at right.)

Comments/Context: In the past few years, Scandinavian photography, and particularly that of the students of the so-called "Helsinki School" in Finland, have been getting some much deserved attention. Ola Kolehmainen is one such graduate of the University of Art and Design in Helsinki (TaiK) and has brought an unexpected Minimalist aesthetic to contemporary architectural photography.

Using the structured facades of contemporary buildings as raw material, Kolehmainen makes fragmented images of these grids and lattices (cropping out the sky and other environmental clues), capturing not only the strict geometrical order of the designs, but also the unexpected reflections and distortions that result from the use of mirrored glass surfaces. Clouds, trees, and nearby buildings all interact with abstract patterns to create compositions that juxtapose natural forms and hard edges. Both light and color also interact with these surfaces; think of them as additional tools the artist has to amplify or mute the serial variations.

There are plenty of direct and indirect echoes of artists like James Turrell, Robert Irwin, and Donald Judd in this body of work, but Kolehmainen is of course working in the two dimensions of photography, which imposes altogether different constraints. I think the best of these works fully abstract the subject matter into forms that are unrecognizable as documents of buildings; luscious patterns and eye catching colors, carefully controlled, pared down to something essential.

Collector's POV: Ola Kolehmainen is represented in New York by Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery (here) and in London by Purdy Hicks Gallery (here). Kolehmainen's works have only become available in the secondary markets in the past year or two, so no pricing pattern is yet discernible. For our particular collection, we again run into the issue of works that are too large; otherwise, these images would fit well with our other city/industrial pictures.

Transit Hub:

• A Building is not a Building, 2009 @Kiasma (here)
• A Building is not a Building, 2009 @National Museum of Photography, Denmark (here)
• Helsinki School (here)