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.

Auction Results: Crossing America: Photographs from the Consolidated Freightways Collection, Part I, April 7, 2011 @Christie's

The sale of Part I of the Consolidated Freightways corporate collection at Christie's last week was an all-around success, with better than expected performance at all price points. The overall Buy-In rate was under 15%, there were plenty of positive surprises, and the Total Sale Proceeds covered the High estimate by more than $400K. Once again, all of the top 10 lots found buyers.

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The summary statistics are below (all results include the buyer’s premium):

Total Lots: 130
Pre Sale Low Total Estimate: $973000
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: $1404000
Total Lots Sold: 111
Total Lots Bought In: 19
Buy In %: 14.62%
Total Sale Proceeds: $1838438
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Here is the breakdown (using the Low, Mid, and High definitions from the preview post, here):

Low Total Lots: 100

Low Sold: 84

Low Bought In: 16

Buy In %: 16.00%

Total Low Estimate: $630000

Total Low Sold: $659188

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Mid Total Lots: 28

Mid Sold: 25

Mid Bought In: 3

Buy In %: 10.71%

Total Mid Estimate: $614000

Total Mid Sold: $910250

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High Total Lots: 2

High Sold: 2

High Bought In: 0

Buy In %: 0.00%

Total High Estimate: $160000
Total High Sold: $269000

The top lot by High estimate was lot 293, Robert Mapplethorpe, Flag, 1987, at $70000-90000; it was also the top outcome of the sale at $158500.
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77.48% of the lots that sold had proceeds in or above the estimate range, and there were a total of 14 surprises in this sale (defined as having proceeds of at least double the high estimate):

Lot 201, Ansel Adams, Coastal Road, c1953, at $23750

Lot 203, Robert Adams, Golden, Colorado, c1974, at $18750

Lot 216, Garry Winogrand, Untitled, 1960, at $40000 (image at right, top, via Christie's)

Lot 218, William Garnett, Train Crossing Desert, Kelso, CA, 1974, at $32500

Lot 219, William Garnett, Waterhole on the Santa Fe Trail with Cattle Tracks, New Mexico, 1975, at $11250 (image at right, middle, via Christie's)

Lot 224, Robert Adams, Lakewood, 1973, at $18750

Lot 244, David Hockney, Merced River, Yosemite Valley, September 1982, 1982, at $40000 (image at right, bottom, via Christie's)

Lot 251, Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, 1936, at $134500

Lot 253, Russell Lee, Oil field worker drinking water, Kilgore, Texas, April 1939, 1939, at $13750
Lot 261, Ben Shahn, Men with Hats, Listening, 1934, at $15000

Lot 262, Weegee, Coney Island, 1940/1950s, at $32500

Lot 294, Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #55, 1980, at $134500
Lot 317, Marion Post Wolcott, Migrant Vegetable Pickers Waiting in Line to be Paid near Homestead, Florida, 1939, at $12500

Lot 319, Garry Winogrand, World's Fair, New York City, 1964/Later, at $23750

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Complete lot by lot results can be found here.

Christie's

20 Rockefeller Plaza

New York, NY 10020

Auction: Signature Vintage & Contemporary Photography Auction, December 3, 2010 @Heritage New York

Heritage's photography sale in New York later this week (online bidding is already open) is a selection of mostly lower priced material, all with starting bids at half the Low estimate. The most surprising find here is an instance of Lee Friedlander's 15 Photographs Portfolio from the early 1970s, which is being broken up and sold as individual images. All in, there are a total of 196 photography lots on offer, with a Total High Estimate of $916800.

Here's the breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including $10000): 187
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): $714300

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between $10000 and $50000): 9
Total Mid Estimate: $202500

Total High Lots (high estimate above $50000): 0
Total High Estimate: NA
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The top lot by High estimate is lot 74040, Ansel Adams, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941/1978, at $30000-50000.

Here is the list of the photographers who are represented by five or more lots in the sale (with the number of lots in parentheses):

Lee Friedlander (15)
Harold Edgerton (10)
Ansel Adams (9)
Eliot Porter (9)
Michael Kenna (7)
Sid Avery (6)
Hank O'Neal (6)
Dennis Hopper (5)
O. Winston Link (5)
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(Lot 74022, Gyorgy Kepes, Untitled (Abstraction), 1953/1970s, at $2500-3500, at right, middle, lot 74038, William Garnett, Plowed Field, Arvin, California, 1951, 1993, at $6000-8000, at right, bottom, and lot 74095, Harold Edgerton, Bullet Through Candle Flame, 1973/1980, at $1000-2000, at right, top, all via Heritage.)
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The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here.

Signature Vintage & Contemporary Photography Auction
December 3rd

Heritage Auctions
The Fletcher-Sinclair Mansion
2 East 79th Street
New York, NY 10075

Auction Results: Photographs, May 18, 2010 @Bonhams

Bonhams had a bit of a rough outing at its Photographs sale in New York earlier this week. With a buy-in rate approaching 50% and total sale proceeds that missed the low by a wide margin, there isn't much excitement to be found these results. Nearly a third of the lots that did sell came in under their estimate ranges, and there were only two positive surprises in the whole sale.

The summary statistics are below (all results include the buyer’s premium):

Total Lots: 132
Pre Sale Low Total Estimate: $722500
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: $1039550
Total Lots Sold: 70
Total Lots Bought In: 62
Buy In %: 46.97%
Total Sale Proceeds: $481290

Here is the breakdown (using the Low, Mid, and High definitions from the preview post, here):

Low Total Lots: 112
Low Sold: 61
Low Bought In: 51
Buy In %: 45.54%
Total Low Estimate: $545550
Total Low Sold: $247660

Mid Total Lots: 19
Mid Sold: 8
Mid Bought In: 11
Buy In %: 57.89%
Total Mid Estimate: $439000
Total Mid Sold: $184830

High Total Lots: 1
High Sold: 1
High Bought In: 0
Buy In %: 0.00%
Total High Estimate: $55000
Total High Sold: $48800

The top lot by High estimate was lot 100, Richard Avedon, Nastassja Kinski and the Serpent, 1981, at $35000-55000; it was also the top outcome of the sale at $48800.

Only 67.14% of the lots that sold had proceeds in or above the estimate range. There were a total of 2 surprises in this sale (defined as having proceeds of at least double the high estimate):

Lot 76, Danny Lyon, Highway 49 from Jackson to Yazoo City, the Entrance to the Delta, 1964/1968, at $4880 (image at right, via Bonhams)
Lot 79, William Garnett, Train Crossing Desert near Kelso, California, 1974, at $13420 (image at right, top, via Bonhams)

Complete lot by lot results can be found here.

Bonhams
580 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10022

Book: William Garnett, Aerial Photographs

JTF (just the facts): Published in 1994 by the University of California Press. 159 pages, with 73 black and white images. Includes an introduction by Martha Sandweiss, a list of exhibitions and a bibliography. The images were made between the early 1950s and the mid 1980s. (Cover shot at right, via Amazon.)

Comments/Context: We had been searching for an inexpensive copy of this book for our library for quite a few years when recently I finally managed to unearth one on the Internet for an affordable sum. As I hold it in my hands now, it was certainly worth the wait.

While aerial photography began back with balloon flights and early airplane experiments decades earlier, William Garnett was the first flying photographer to move the images beyond their geographical/topographical/military beginnings and into the realm of art. In this volume, Garnett's subjects are primarily the hills and valleys of the Western United States: sand dunes, water eroded canyons, the twists and turns of rivers fingering out into deltas, salt flats, frothy ocean surf, and the farmland patterns made by plows, tractors and irrigation.

In spirit, these images have much in common with the Ansel Adams school of photography: meticulous attention to craft, resulting in crisp prints with broad tonal ranges, and an overall perspective that well made images of the glories of the West could be important in the larger movement toward environmental preservation/conservation. In actual look however, with the horizon lines cropped out, many of Garnett's images bear resemblance to the work of Minor White: amorphous, organic designs that aren't exactly identifiable as anything specific (given uncertainties of scale), but are somehow evocative of the artist's point of view. Light and shadow are the primary tools used to highlight the patterns and textures found in the landscape, where rivers become sinuous painterly curves and parched sand dunes and mesas become undulating sculptural forms. Only the intrusions of man bring hard edges and straight lines to these pictures: the broad stripes of strip cut grain and hay, the narrow lines of irrigation furrows, the back and forth swirls of tractor patterns, the flat edges of a sewage pond, or the perfect horizontal line of a railroad train.

Overall, this is a much deeper body of work than I had expected or known; this volume includes page after page of superlative imagery, deftly exploring astonishing facets of the abstract landscape from a bird's eye perspective. It is a book that successfully challenges the traditional boundaries of classic landscape photography, and is one that rewards close and repeated looking.
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Collector's POV: It's not at all clear which galleries might officially represent the estate of William Garnett, but both Scott Nichols Gallery in San Francisco (here) and Joseph Bellows Gallery in La Jolla (here) hold some inventory of his work. Garnett's images have not come up at auction much in the past few years; those prints that have sold have ranged in price between $3000 and $8000. We continue to be on the lookout for a terrific Garnett print for our collection. In our particular case, one of his patterned images of suburban buildings (not included in this book, as the images here are all landscapes of one kind or another) would be the best match.

Transit Hub:

• Getty Museum profile/holdings (here)
• NYTimes obituary (here)