AIPAD’s 45th Edition Puts New Light on Favorites at Park Avenue Armory
The Association of International Photography Art Dealers presents The Photography Show, featuring 77 exhibitors from around the world
On a crisp April night, a crowd of photography lovers gathered at New York City’s beloved Park Avenue Armory to preview the annual show from The Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD), the longest-running photography fair in the United States. Participants included 77 exhibitors from North America, South America, Asia, Europe, and Australia.
The highlights of the exhibition are plentiful. There is a focus on Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia, with strong representation for Graciela Iturbide, whose fearless work can be seen at several galleries, including a strong selection of her work at Ruiz-Healy, near the start of the show, upon turning right at the entry. Throckmorton Fine Art had a classic century-spanning selection of woman-driven Latin American art, with an enticing batch of images of Frida Kahlo and the Mexico City cohort that blossomed around the artist and her husband, Diego Rivera, as well as work by Tina Modotti herself. A print of the well-known Lucienne Bloch portrait of Kahlo had a little red “sold” sticker on the caption within a few hours of the preview doors opening. Spencer Throckmorton pulls his selection together as an act of love to share with the collector.
Much of the selection skewed to the hometown crowd, but it was a happy case of exhibitors knowing their audiences. The show was full of work pulling from both the gritty and glam eras in New York memory. Paris’s Polka brought William Klein’s Gun and a colorful batch of Joel Meyerowitz, who was also on view at Howard Greenberg in C4 with the pointed Camel Coats.
Around the booths, locally focused and internationally famous photos offered the comfort of the old, the surprise of the new, and the joy of seeing an image you always thought you knew in a print for the first time in ages. There was also the pleasant shock of finding a freshly presented remix of elements known from elsewhere; everybody knows Richard Avedon’s Dovima with Elephants, but please take a look at William Helburn’s Dovima Under the El. Over at Cavalier’s display, works by Ruth Orkin include both the poster-happy American Girl in Italy and a less reprinted companion, Jinx and Carlo on Scooter. The later one hangs above the former. The two pictures were taken on the same day in 1951. Minus a backstory on the day they were shot in Florence, their juxtaposition poses a troubling question: oh dear, did the catcalling work? Ideally, take both photographs home as a conversation starter.
Atlanta’s Jackson Fine Arts had a capacious booth featuring a remarkable array of photographs from Sally Mann’s “Twelve” series. They also had a striking series of Gordon Park’s landmark images from their “The South in Color” exhibit, including some that were not released for public until this century. An Untitled by Parks from 1956 is special: he makes wonderful use of the specific, lamentably bygone capabilities of Kodachrome to create a composition in gorgeously muted pinks and greens behind the elderly Black couple in the foreground.
Also well worth checking out are Edward Burtynsky’s Vale Tailings at San Francisco’s Robert Koch, which have the look of an extraterrestrial terrain map in orange and gray. For other memorably selective uses of color, there’s Osceola Refetoff’s “Chromatopia” series at Santa Monica’s Van Lintel Gallery. Catherine Couturier Gallery, from Houston, has a great semi-abstract group of pictures by Cara Barer that show shape moribund documentation papers into flowerlike, globular forms agains an absorbingly blackest black background.
Toward the end of the left aisle, in D16, Echo Galleries has an essay in rich, restrained metallics in Jan Schlegel’s “My Secret Garden,” a platinum-print series of large-format collodion negatives of tulips. Eight prints hung in two rows of four are printed on Japanese Gampi paper mounted on gold. Together, they give the sense of standing quietly in at least four centuries at once. Next, walk all the way to the back of the Drill Hall for MUUS Collective’s brilliantly curated mini-retrospective on Rosalind Fox Solomon, who died last year.
Circling back around, Keith de Lellis Gallery Fine Art Photography has a Cecil Beaton of a very young and wide-eyed Daphne du Maurier with an expression on her face as if she just conceived the denouement for Rebecca the moment the shutter snapped. Finally, JJ Levine at Elephant Gallery has a playful spin on gender identity in which the same model presents as both the male and female members of a couple in the “Alone Time” series.
It’s impossible to mention every noteworthy thing for every taste, and easy to leave the Armory feeling dazzled.
The Photography Show is on view at the Park Avenue Armory April 22–26.
