At AIPAD, A Celebration of Diversity
Next week in Manhattan, more than 115 galleries will gather for the annual showcase organized by the Association of International Photography Dealers (AIPAD). For the first time, this year’s edition will be held at Pier 94, which will allow for an expanded format that includes sixteen AIPAD Talks and three curated exhibitions featuring work from the private collections of Artur Walther, Martin Z. Margulies, and Madeleine P. Plonsker. The AIPAD Photography Show is the longest-running fair dedicated to the photographic medium and one of the highlights of the spring calendar.
On view is an assortment of nineteenth-century modern and contemporary photographs, as well as photo-based art, video, and new media. The show will be arranged in four thematic sections—Salon, Gallery, Positions, and Discovery—and will feature new and established gallerists, including renowned dealers like Peter Fetterman Gallery (Santa Monica, Calif.) and Robert Klein Gallery (Boston, Mass.).
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This year’s iteration of the Photography Show has an international flavor, as exemplified by the exhibition space organized by Throckmorton Fine Art (New York), which will feature artists from nearly every continent, including Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Mario Algaze, Edward Weston, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Fritz Henle, to name a few. Throckmorton’s display is infused with pathos, cataloguing intimate moments in a Mexican village or Haitian factory. In Henle’s Frida on Chinampa Boat (1936), above, we see a portrait of the early-twentieth-century Mexican painter trailing her fingers in placid water. Around her neck is a string of chunky beads and dangling from her ear is a gilded cockerel. Next to this is Algaze’s “La mano del tejedor,” San Angel, Mexico (2016), a study in textures: the puckered fabric of a sleeve, the wrinkled hand of an artisan, and a partially woven basket, a tangle of looping fibers.
“In the arts, there are no borders, there are no boundaries,” says Kraige Block, executive director of Throckmorton and president-elect of AIPAD. “In this current political situation that we find ourselves in, we’re celebrating our differences.”
- Stephen Wilkes, Brooklyn Bridge, New York City, Day to Night, 2016. ©Stephen Wilkes/Courtesy Peter Fetterman Gallery, Santa Monica.
As chair of the Show Committee, Block designed the four-day extravaganza with the aim of encouraging the next generation of photography enthusiasts. One section, Discovery, is reserved for dealers who have been in business for five years or less, and another area is dedicated to book dealers and publishers. “For young collectors, a photography book can really be a gateway to the profession,” he says. “Collectors come to the Show to see what’s possible.”
Away from the stands, an extensive schedule of special events will address a number of hot-button issues, such as surveillance, climate change and social justice. On March 30, Sandra Phillips, curator emerita of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), will host a discussion, “What Happened to Looking at the World,” that considers the role of photography at a time of ubiquitous surveillance and digital data-gathering. The following day, the artist James Balog will hold forth on some of the most pressing ecological matters of the day in a talk titled “Extreme Ice, Rare Trees, and Endangered Animals.” This will be followed on April 1 with “Vision & Justice,” a meditation on the relationship between photography and social justice featuring Sarah Lewis, assistant professor at Harvard University.
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Throughout the show, the photographer Lucien Samaha (b. 1958) will take photographs of fairgoers with the world’s first digital camera, invented at Kodak Labs in 1991. (Fairgoers are then invited to purchase 8 x 10 in. prints at the end of the day.) Samaha was a member of the team that developed the device and is believed to be the first person to have ever taken a photograph with a digital camera. The New York-based photographer rose to prominence by chronicling the ravages of war in his native Lebanon.
The proceedings will kick off during a Vernissage on March 29 when Sandra Phillips, of SFMOMA, and Anne Wilkes Tucker, founding curator of photography at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, are presented with the AIPAD Award in recognition of their contributions to the field.
The Photography Show will be held March 30—April 2, 2017 at Pier 94, 711 12th Ave., New York, NY 10019. For more information, call 202.367.1158 or visit https://www.aipadshow.com. Read our coverage of the 2016 edition of the event.
