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.
Read more about: Alejandra Laviada, Alejandro Cartagena, Christine Osinski, Duane Michals, Edward Weston, Eikoh Hosoe, Helen Sear, Liu Xiaofang, Malick Sidibé, Peter Keetman, Tom Wood, Weegee (Arthur Felig), William Bell, William Larson, 798 Photo Gallery, Catherine Couturier Gallery, Eric Franck Fine Art, Gallery 339, Gallery Fifty One, Henry Feldstein, Julie Saul Gallery, Klompching Gallery, Kopeikin Gallery, Picture Photo Space, Rick Wester Fine Art, Sasha Wolf Projects, Throckmorton Fine Art, William L. Schaeffer Photographs, AIPAD Photography Show ~ Pier 94