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• Issue #249
• Article

By Alex Novak

New this year at the Photography Show presented by AIPAD are "Project Spaces" that are dedicated areas that present a single artist or a space curated around a specific project, theme, or idea. Photographs are, nonetheless, for sale in each of these 23 booths. To visit the project booths, go straight back from the entrance to the Show, which is held from April 3-7 at Pier 94, NYC.

Here are those spaces:

AMERICAN SOCIETY OF MEDIA PHOTOGRAPHERS, NEW YORK (#1008)
"Americana"
For many people the word "Americana" inspires references to apple pie, baseball, cowboys, and the United States flag. Iconic images of the country's historical and cultural legacy often reflect simple, everyday life, steeped in popular appeal. Today's image-makers dispel the tropes and clichés with imaginative and sometimes subversive perspectives on what it means to be an American and to live here. The simple way of life is gone and things now look complicated beyond our wildest dreams, and maybe beyond our control. A unified, popular view is absent. Can we still find Americana beautiful? More importantly, what does all this say about us?

BLANCA BERLIN GALLERY, MADRID (#1020)
'A Series Documenting an Abandond Artist Home"
The photography series documents the artist home in Barcelona from his childhood, now uninhabited for 30 years. The images portray each of the rooms of the house from an intimate and nostalgic perspective: gone by memories and experiences emerge from the past. Time is deposited silently over the left objects, furniture and works of art. Neglected and forgotten, family memories reverberate through light and color that once took place.

Renate Aller: Pl.44, Alaska, Matanuska Range, August 2017

CATHERINE COUTURIER GALLERY, HOUSTON, TX * (#1012)
"Mountain Interval"
The latest project from New York-based German photographer Renate Aller depicts mountain ranges from six continents, including European glaciers and mountain peaks of her childhood vacations. It is accompanied by a monograph published by Radius Books. The photographs are a continued exploration of the interrelationship between romanticism, memory, and place. In Mountain Interval, Aller has captured the most celebrated and challenging mountain ranges across six continents, photographed while standing at elevations as high as 22,500 ft. Aller isolates the mountain from its expected surroundings, presents them next to oceanscapes, reading as one landscape. She presents the familiar and the known in an intimate way, relating to parallel realities from different locations, opening up conversations between the different (political) landscapes in which we live.

CLAMPART, NEW YORK * (#1003)
"New work from Lissa Rivera's ongoing series 'Beautiful Boy'"
With this recent work the artist takes her interest in photography's connection with identity to a personal level, focusing on her gender queer domestic partner as muse. A selection of 8-10 photographs and video from "Beautiful Boy - Chapter IV" will be shown.

André Kertész: Lovers or Kiss, Budapest, 1915/1963 (Copyright and courtesy of the Estate of André Kertész)

CONTEMPORARY WORKS/VINTAGE WORKS, CHALFONT, PA * (#1015)
"Master Photographer Andre Kertesz: Prague, Paris and New York "
The photographs will span the body of work by this Modernist photographer in three countries, beginning with Hungary in 1919, on to Paris and ending in New York City. (A fourth country, Israel, will be featured in the main booth. Most of the photographs are early, unique or rare prints or formats, although there are also the iconic images that made Kertesz famous as one of the most important humanist and modernist artists of the 20th century. From the vintage contact prints from early Hungarian images to his Modernist Paris and NYC views to the unique set of photos made for his museum show in Jerusalem in 1980, this exhibit will be a visual exploration of the photographer's own photo biography. Additional Kertesz photographs will also be featured in the company's main booth (#808).

DUNCAN MILLER GALLERY, SANTA MONICA, CA (#1016)
"Solo booth featuring the work of photographer Bogdan Dziworski"

Alex Webb, Tehuantepec, Mexico, 1985, vintage Cibachrome,

ETHERTON GALLERY, TUCSON, AZ * AND STEPHEN DAITER GALLERY, CHICAGO * (#1001)
"Solo booth featuring the work of photographer Alex Webb"
Alex Webb is a well-known Magnum photographer, who is represented by several AIPAD dealers. A selection of approximately 12 vintage Cibachromes that have only recently been made available will be shown. All of the prints will be framed using Optium acrylic and Curatorial Assistance Art Frames.

GALERIE SIT DOWN, PARIS (#1002)
"Florian Ruiz / The White Contamination series"
In the snowy landscapes of the heights of Fukushima, Florian Ruiz has captured the invisible pain of radiation. Inspired by the drawings and the artwork of Utagawa Hiroshige's Japanese engravings, he hoped to capture the fleeting moments, the movements of climatic phenomena, and the ever-shifting perceptions of nature, where radiation accumulates the most. With a geiger counter, he measured the radioactive contamination's presence. By a process of staggered super impressions, he intended to show the atom's alteration in his pictures

KAMOINGE, INC., NEW YORK (#1007)
"The African Diaspora, or Kamoinge"
This show is about the active participation of vastly individual images that build a bridge of honesty, humanity and artistry. A collective interpretation of the culture and lived experience among the African Diaspora. Come walk with us! Kamoinge, a Kikuyu word meaning "a group working together", is a collective of photographers from the African Diaspora, who approach photography as fine art, supporting and fostering positive images in our communities worldwide. It is our hope to stem the tide of negative images that have depicted people of color. It is our mission to make a broad range of significant images that come from our unique experiences and vision.

KEITH DE LELLIS GALLERY, NEW YORK * (#1021)
"George Platt Lynes and Pajama (Paul Cadmus, Jared French, Margaret French)"
George Platt Lynes is a well-known and highly regarded portraitist famous for his nudes, portraits and dance photography. His homoerotic nudes and mythology photographs are some of his most important works, and he was influential on artists like Bruce Weber, Robert Mapplethorpe and Herbert Ritts. Pajama is an artists' collaboration of three painters who were known as proponents of Magic Realism and as a group photographed members of their circle (which included George Platt Lynes, Monroe Wheeler, Lincoln Kirstein, Fidelma Cadmus, George Tooker, etc.) The images informed their paintings and captured their subjects in various poses using the backdrop of Fire Island and Provincetown in addition to other locales.

KOPEIKIN GALLERY, LOS ANGELES (#1011)
"Booth featuring the work of Alejandro Cartagena and Carla Jay Harris"

MOMENTUM FINE ART, MIAMI, FL (#1004)
"Solo booth featuring the work of photographer Ole Marius Joergensen"

Arthur Tress, Woman with Binocular Viewers, San Francisco, 1964

MOREHOUSE GALLERY, LAREDO, TX (#1006)
"Arthur Tress: 1960s - 1980s"
Showing mostly vintage prints from the first half of the artist's long career, including examples from:
Appalachia (his earliest work); Open Space in the Inner City; Dream Collector; Theater of the Mind; Shadows; and other works. This exhibition coincides with the announcement of the artist's archive being acquired by Stanford University.

PETER FETTERMAN GALLERY, SANTA MONICA, CA * (#1014)
"Solo booth featuring the work of Finnish photographer, Pentti Sammallahti"
All signed gelatin silver prints printed by the artist.

PHOTO-EYE, SANTA FE, NM (#1022)
"A solo show of recent work by Reuben Wu"
Reuben Wu is a British photographer, born in 1975 in Liverpool. He's also a violinist, keyboardist, DJ and music producer for the popular electronic band Ladytron. He is considered one of the most cutting-edge, high-tech photographers of our time. Wu uses drones equipped with high-intensity lights to illuminate his landscapes at night for his long exposure photography, while also creating minimalistic, geometric designs in the sky above those lit landscapes. The result is a powerful, refreshingly contemporary vision of the landscape. The booth will include three of his largest pieces and multiple smaller pieces of this body of work.

RICK WESTER FINE ART, NEW YORK * (#1010)
"DeLIMITations, by David Taylor and Marcos Ramírez ERRE"
This is a project executed by two artists, one American and the other Mexican, which surveys the original 1821 border of their respective countries. Never formally defined, the original border fell in 1848 with the Mexican-American War, costing Mexico half its land. Taylor, a photographer known for his epic documentation of the 257 obelisks that define the current Mexico-US border, (Radius Books, 2015) and ERRE, a conceptual sculptor whose work will be featured in a solo exhibition at MASS MoCA in 2019, began their collaboration in 2014. The project eventually turned into a 3,700 mile journey over the 2,400 mile border that the artists dotted with 47 land markers of galvanized steel, hand-crafted by Ramírez and based on the Congressionally mandated 19th-century monuments.

ROBERT MANN GALLERY, NEW YORK * (#1018)
"Solo booth featuring the work of photographer Cig Harvey"
Cig Harvey (b. 1973, Devon, UK) is an artist whose practice seeks to capture the magic in everyday life. The presentation will look at her four bodies of work, "You Look At Me Like An Emergency", "Gardening at Night", "You An Orchestra You A Bomb" and "Pavlovas at Midnight". Capturing a moment that reveals a truth, an intensity, a shock, through subjects and settings familiar to us, Harvey's work leads us through the looking glass to a world of wonder. Most recently, Harvey has focused on the immediate sensory experience of looking at a photograph, making pictures that trigger sensory cues. She wants to understand the sensory impact of color on memory and emotion, and the theory of color as a sensation rather than a physical property. This builds upon her personal exploration of love, loss, longing and belonging.

SOPHOTO GALLERY, BEIJING (#1005)
"'Heart of Keriya', a series of documentary photographs created by Yaqiang Chen"
Keriya is a primitive civilization, which exists in the Chinese Taklamakan desert, and they live next to a seasonal river called Keriya. Sven Hedin first discovered this place in 1896, and they still live here at present. Yaqiang Chen has visited Keriya over 30 times, each time he stays here for two to four weeks, and lives and dines with the people of Keriya. As for his contribution to society as a whole, Chen Yaqiang has created the Keriyan Files, and has offered an important contribution to the study of visual anthropology. Behind his peaceful visage lies passionate forbearance. As Chen Yaqiang has become a part of Keriyan society as an equal to the locals, he has assimilated their dignified qualities. Observing and understanding Keriyan culture from the perspective of visual anthropology as allowed him to recreate a picture of what the Keriyan people would have been like in Pre-industrial Age civilization.

STALEY-WISE GALLERY, NEW YORK * (#1019)
"Solo booth featuring the work of Rodney Smith."
Smith was born in 1947 in New York City, and after graduating with a degree in theology from Yale University he began travelling throughout the world while making photographic portraits of workers, farmers, and landscapes. Smith's signature style of using light to reveal his subjects was rendered in a broad spectrum of tones, ranging from crisp white highlights, to deep velvety shadows. In this way, he edited his world, making it sharper and clearer, bringing order to chaos. Smith's work has appeared in countless magazines, books, galleries and museums around the world. In the catalog of a 2003 show of Smith's photography at the University of Virginia, the curator and writer Jonathan Stuhlman wrote "In Smith's enchanted world, balance produces beauty, laughter and whimsy dance hand in hand, and things are not always what they seem. The photographs offer a perfect blend of reverie and reality." Rodney Smith died in 2016.

STEPHEN BULGER GALLERY, TORONTO, CANADA * AND PIERRE-FRANÇOIS OUELLETTE ART CONTEMPORAIN, MONTREAL (#1000)
"As Immense as the Sky by Meryl McMaster"
As Immense as the Sky is a hybrid expression; it is the intersection of two narratives that draw on land, ancestry, memory and self. This new series focuses on the overlapping of cultures and histories--public/private, familial/non-familial--of specific landscapes across Canada and how different experiences of the land inform our identities today. It is about re-experiencing ancestral stories.

TAYLOR GRAHAM, NEW YORK (#1017)
"Formento + Formento: Mt Fuji and Beyond the Edge of the Frame"
The captivating tableaus exude a sense of tension, melancholy, and a quiet unease. Each image from Japan Diaries exists as if it were a still taken from a noir Japanese film, each solitary figure yearning for something unknown. In Winter 2018, BJ and Richeille Formento traveled once again to the nation they recognize as their spirit place to embark on the sequel to their acclaimed series "Japan Diaries." Channeling Hokusai, they turned their focus toward Mt. Fuji, recreating his "36 Views of Mt. Fuji" in their own photographic language. The exhibition will focus on the new iteration of this series as it has evolved from its primary chapter, this time exploring how the mountain's energy permeates the Japanese countryside and colors its culture. The women in Formento & Formento's photographs play out an imagined life under the strength of the mountain, and beyond the edge of the frame.

VRG, HONG KONG (#1013)
"Grid System by William Furniss"
Grid System is a body of work run through with the spirit of urbanism. Enlarged contact sheets are used to survey ideas in urban planning both old and new in an effort to highlight the best elements of city living. Landmarks, mass transit, street layout, use of space, freedom of choice are all themes of interest. The reasons for using film and contact sheets are two fold; validity of images where the physical manipulations are analogue and honest not digital and furtive, also liberation from the paramount photographic restrictions of where to stand and when to press the shutter button; this method of shooting allows movement of the camera and combinations of frames taken over long periods.

YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY, NEW YORK * (#1009)
"Serial work by photographer Zanele Muholi"
The work shown includes "Brave Beauties", "Faces & Phases" and the debut of a new triptych.

Asterisks note an AIPAD member.

Novak has over 48 years experience in the photography-collecting arena. He is a long-time member and formerly board member of the Daguerreian Society, and, when it was still functioning, he was a member of the American Photographic Historical Society (APHS). He organized the 2016 19th-century Photography Show and Conference for the Daguerreian Society. He is also a long-time member of the Association of International Photography Art Dealers, or AIPAD. Novak has been a member of the board of the nonprofit Photo Review, which publishes both the Photo Review and the Photograph Collector, and is currently on the Photo Review's advisory board. He was a founding member of the Getty Museum Photography Council. He is author of French 19th-Century Master Photographers: Life into Art.

Novak has had photography articles and columns published in several newspapers, the American Photographic Historical Society newsletter, the Photograph Collector and the Daguerreian Society newsletter. He writes and publishes the E-Photo Newsletter, the largest circulation newsletter in the field. Novak is also president and owner of Contemporary Works/Vintage Works, a private photography dealer, which sells by appointment and has sold at exhibit shows, such as AIPAD New York and Miami, Art Chicago, Classic Photography LA, Photo LA, Paris Photo, The 19th-century Photography Show, Art Miami, etc.