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.

Book: Peter Keetman, Bewegung und Struktur

JTF (just the facts): Published in 1996 by Cinubia Production, under the direction of Manfred Heiting. 160 pages, with 108 black and white images. Includes essays by Rolf Sachsse, Holger Tiedemann, a biography and a bibliography, all in German. (Cover shot at right.)

Comments/Context: Many collectors will recognize the work of German photographer Peter Keetman by one of his signature projects: his images of water and oil droplets, or perhaps his work documenting a Volkswagen factory in the early 1950s. Along with Otto Steinert, Toni Schneiders, Ludwig Windstosser, Siegfried Lauterwasser and others, Keetman was part of a group called Fotoform, who pursued an approach to image making called Subjektive Fotographie (or "subjective photography"), in reaction to the Neue Sachlichkeit (or "new objectivity") movement of Renger-Patzsch, Blossfeldt and others from the 1920s. These photographers were looking for a more moderate form of Modernism, a return to humanism after decades of cool detachment.

While we already own the Volkswagenwerk 1953 book (linked below), we have had a hard time finding a more comprehensive monograph of Keetman's work. So when we recently came across this volume buried in the stacks at the Strand, we knew we had to have it, even though all the essays are in German.

In general, Keetman's works have strong qualities of simple abstraction: geometries, patterns and repetitions that anchor the compositions, even when they have natural forms or everyday situations as their subject matter. Plowed fields, rooftops, construction sites, water droplets, waves, and molded steel car hoods all become carefully controlled exercises in the arrangement of sinuous lines. We particularly like his multiple exposure images, many of which capture the frenetic motion and energy of city life (there is an amazing multiple image of windows and scaffolding in this book, entitled 2 mal 1 1/2, from 1959, that we had never seen before).

For some reason, Keetman and his contemporaries seem to have been bypassed by many vintage collectors. Perhaps this is because they are less well known here in the United States, or maybe it is their transitional, in between placement, sandwiched just after Callahan and Siskind but before the New Topographics. I think the photography from this movement (and Keetman's images more specifically) makes an intriguing connection between the ID Chicago school and someone like Kertesz. There were many approaches to reworking and manipulating Modernism in new ways during this period, and adding the voices of these 1950s German photographers adds color to this conversation.

In any case, this book is an excellent reminder of Keetman's consistency over the decades. Pick up a copy if you can find one to see a broader sample of his output.

Collector’s POV: It is not at all clear to us who might represent the estate of Peter Keetman. Both Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York (here) and Galerie Kicken Berlin (here) carry some inventory of his work. Luckily, Keetman's vintage prints regularly come up for sale at the German auction houses, generally finding buyers in a range between $2000 and $8000, with most near the lower end of that range, so it's quite easy to find a solid example of his work in the secondary markets. We already have one Peter Keetman image in our collection (here) and can absolutely imagine adding others in the future.

Transit Hub:

• Volkswagenwwerk 1953 (here)
• Schupmann Collection (here)
• Fotoform (here)

Auction: Photographie, June 8, 2009 @Van Ham

Next week in Cologne, the German photography season continues with a wide ranging sale at Van Ham. Most of the lots are in the lower priced range, the vast majority estimated under 2000€, so there may indeed be some bargains to be had here. There are a total of 376 lots on offer, with a total High estimate of 526750€. (Catalog cover at right.)

Here's the breakdown:

Total Low lots (high estimate 7500€ or lower): 370

Total Low estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): 456750€

Total Mid lots (high estimate between 7500€ and 35000€): 6

Total Mid estimate: 70000€

Total High lots (high estimate over 35000€): 0

Total High estimate: NA

For our collection, we liked the following:

• Lot 538 Max Baur, Chrysanthemen, 1930s
• Lot 635 John Havinden, Steinzeugrohre, 1930s
• Lot 642 Heinz Held, Empire State Building, 1960s
• Lot 674 Peter Keetman, VW-Werk, 1953 (image at right)
• Lot 755 Albert Renger-Patzsch, Der zehnstockige ROGO-Turm, 1936
• Lot 774 Tata Ronkholz, Autoplatz Hurth Bonnstr. 379a, 1984
• Lot 854 Ludwig Windstosser, Pintsch Bamag, Gas, 1950s

The lot by lot catalog can be found here.

Photographie

June 8

Van Ham Kunstauctionen

Schönhauser Straße 10-16

50968 Köln