Galerie Johannes Faber (here): This 1963 work by the Czech photographer Jaroslav Rössler was made from three color sheets layered together. The light effects are flared and morphed, edging toward dreamy psychedelia or a blasted squint into the sun. Priced at $7300.

Galerie Johannes Faber (here): Vintage microphotography nearly always has a boldly scientific feel, but sometimes the enlarged visuals feature surprisingly elegant patterns and forms, like those found in this 1924 work by Laure Albin-Guillot. The resulting composition feels almost mechanical, like gears turning. Priced at $7300.

Galerie Johannes Faber (here): This scattered jumble of overturned tables and clumped chairs seems to capture well the cluttered exhaustion at the end of a party. Made by Horst P. Horst in 1952, the white chair backs and arms seem almost cartoonishly scribbled, bouncing around the garden. Priced at $11000.

Stephen Daiter Gallery (here): Robert Heinecken’s early photo puzzles (this six piece example is from c1967) break bodies into abstract parts, which can then be further rearranged and reassembled. The movement smartly activates and reorients compositions, creating new visual dialogues between the component parts. Priced at $16000.

Stephen Daiter Gallery (here): This surreal nude distortion, made with a carnival mirror by André Kertész in 1933, was another standout vintage gem on view at the fair. The curves of the body are strangely twisted and seductively elongated, turning the legs and arms into a malleable formal object that can be pushed and pulled into inexplicable shapes. Priced at $120000.

Stephen Daiter Gallery (here): From afar, this 1967 work by Barbara Blondeau looks like scuffed clouds, drifting dark smoke, or perhaps some other kind of insistent mark making that continued until the inky build up became black. Up close, it turns out that the work is almost fractal, with a single reversed tonality image of a seated nude repeated over and over again in different sizes. The result is a jumbled miasma of folded arms and legs, piled up as though discarded. Priced at $6500.

Stephen Daiter Gallery (here): Layers of smokestacks and criss crossed wires turn this 1955 industrial image by Charles Swedlund into a neatly ordered abstraction. The composition seems to be an impressive feat of multiple exposure or darkroom montage, with misty striped verticals continually interrupted by intermingled angled lines. Priced at $6500.

Michael Hoppen Gallery (here): Displayed in a plastic box on the booth table, this recent discovery of a box of 1860s era prints by Étienne-Jules Marey was an unexpected treasure. Composed of 15 individual prints of bodies in motion, and housed in a small paper box with a Lumière Brothers label, the work includes various photographs of running, jumping, and other physical feats, each a marvel of time lapsed multiple exposure. Priced at $50000.

Toluca Fine Art (here): Gertrudis de Moses was another discovery for me at this year’s fair. De Moses was a German photographer who fled in 1937 and resettled in Chile, where she was one of the founders of Foto Cine Club of Chile. This 1969 work certainly has a witchy late Surrealist mood, with a hovering face, wispy arms, and fiery flames mixed into an imaginatively dreamlike moment. Priced at $6800.

Von Lintel Gallery (here): The work of the German photographer Floris Neüsuss is well known in experimental photography circles, but deserves to be more broadly appreciated. Neüsuss consistently extended and expanded photogram techniques, but this image was my first encounter with his efforts in color. Flares of light seem to emanate from the twisted anthurium stems, the color palette moving from an enveloping green to the increasing warmth of yellow and pink. Priced at $16500.

Deborah Bell Photographs (here): Across her career, Kati Horna made many images of dolls, doll heads, and doll parts, often pushing the subject matter toward the uncanny and the surreal. In many cases, Horna also employed multiple negatives and superimposition to sandwich unlike images together, as in this work where the two doll heads appear to be merged with some kind of textural rock face. The two dolls were already vaguely creepy with their eyes askew, but the rough hewn addition gives them a further feeling of mottled decay. Priced at $18000.

Interestingly, Etherton Gallery had a variant image of this same 1939 two headed doll composition on view, without the second image overlay, so clearly Horna was constantly recombining these images in alternate configurations.

Deborah Bell Photographs (here): An apple, a pear, a lime, and some mirrors come together in this smartly illusionistic vintage still life by Florence Henri. Angled blocks of light and dark are similarly reflected and doubled, adding to the complex layers of disorientation. Priced at $35000.

Deborah Bell Photographs (here): When the pandemic hit in New York City, one of the most popular governmental responses was to loosen the rules for sidewalk dining, to allow restaurants to serve customers out in the open air of the streets. In the years that followed, the originally improvised outdoor spaces become more permanent, and in many cases quite stylized and architectural, the resulting structures becoming the subject matter for a series of photographs by Wijnanda Deroo. Across her career, Deroo has made many images of empty architectural spaces, and she has applied that squared off and reserved aesthetic to a range of outdoor dining spots around town. The images already feel like a nostalgic time capsule, documenting the ways plucky hustling New Yorkers tried to make the best of a bad situation. Priced at $4000 each.

MUUS Collection (here): This booth was a solo presentation of the work of Deborah Turbeville, in particular a selection of Polaroids she arranged into album sheets. In this shadowy image, the reclining woman’s flowered dress is dappled by the sunlight, with a wash of gold toning applied over the top to add another layer of dissolving atmospheric mystery. NFS.

Michael Shapiro Photographs (no website): Ed Feingersh was a successful 1950s era photojournalist, and this unexpected underneath perspective of a saxophonist shows why. It’s a dynamic composition, recalling the steep angles of Rodchenko but with a decidedly fluid and jazzy energy. Priced at $5000.

Michael Shapiro Photographs (no website): Sometimes a photograph just doesn’t reveal its secrets. Apparently Lotte Jacobi made her 1950s cameraless “photogenics” by interrupting the light from a flashlight with twisted pieces of cellophane. Even with that information, it’s hard to figure out exactly how the wispy lines of light and dark in this composition were made. The figures look like stylized birds in the sky, each a paired interchange of light and dark. Priced at $7500.

Photo Discovery (here): Jakob von Narkiewicz-Jodko was a 19th century Russian scientist who studied the properties of electricity. This c1895 scientific image captures the branching properties of electrical current, visually recalling the veins of a leaf or the tributaries of a river. More recently, Hiroshi Sugimoto has made related images of lightning fields, capturing similarly splintering fields and pathways. Priced at $15000.

Photo Discovery (here): This surprisingly large salt print from 1858 documents the Indian delegation to the Dakota Treaty negotiations in Washington. As a piece of history, it tells the story of a treaty that ceded tribal lands near the Minnesota River to the US government. But as a piece of photographic art, it’s a powerful early example of Indigenous peoples being seen generally on their own terms. Attributed to Charles DeForest Fredricks, and priced at $150000.

Daniel/Oliver Gallery (here): This 1930s photographic composition by Josef Breitenbach was conceived as a pattern for “Surrealist wallpaper”. Mixing photogram techniques with overpainting, it layers coral-like branched abstractions over a field of lines, creating a bold pattern that would have certainly enlivened the walls of most any room. Priced at $1750.

Marshall Gallery (here): Peter Wegner’s urban photographs take the sculptural idea of negative space and turn it into an unexpected compositional tool. Looking down the streets of New York (and other cities) and then inverting his vantage point, Wegner discovered the shapes of buildings “made of sky”. With a squint of the eyes, these forms become altogether plausible skyscrapers set against the surrounding darkness, a kind of hidden in plain sight invention. Priced at $25000 for the set of 9 prints.

Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière (here): It might be hard to identify this 1976 photograph as having been made by the British photographer Martin Parr, but even in this early work, Parr’s wry eye for understated visual comedy was clearly present. As the man strips the paint or fixes something on the door frame, his figure hovers on one leg above the ladder, the geometries of the composition placing this playful everyday improvisation within an ordered structure. Priced at $16000.

Higher Pictures (here): As a follow up to the recent knockout restaging of Carla Williams’s 1985 BFA thesis show (reviewed here), this booth offered a solo presentation of her MFA efforts from a few years later at the University of New Mexico. The large scale portraits and nudes on view are paper composites, where a single Polaroid image is printed across multiple interlocked sheets, building up a figure (or a persona) from shifting component parts. Offered as one entire installation, POR.

Laurence Miller Gallery (here): This 1964 grid of images by Ray Metzker turns sailors walking in the city (some with their duffel bags) into something like runes, or perhaps a stick figure alphabet. The subtle gradations of light and dark give the repetitions a sense of dynamism, almost like a dance in the enveloping darkness. Priced at $65000.

Danziger Gallery (here): Matthew Porter has made plenty of images of muscle cars soaring over city streets in his career, but this is a fresh one, made in 2024 in San Francisco (you can see the sign for Leavenworth Street if you look closely.) Here the car flies over a woman crossing the street, the setting sun flaring the light into a blast of fading orange. Priced at $18000.

Ippodo Gallery (here): Dandelion seed heads must be among the most fragile things a photographer might choose as a subject, but the Japanese photographer Ryuji Taira seems to have mastered the process of controlling their vulnerabilities. In images like this one, Taira has meticulously arranged the dandelion heads in various geometric patterns and arrays, printing the resulting images on gampi paper to amplify their tactile properties. Here delicate shadows underlay the careful arrangement, doubling the tiny stems and furry orbs. Priced at $2660.

Staley-Wise Gallery (here): The swirling motion in this 2024 fashion image by Txema Yeste is altogether eye catching. The pleats and drapes of the bold red dress ripple and curve as it flows through the air, pulling us along its sinuous lines. Priced at $6800.

Augusta Edwards Fine Art (here): The edges of this c1960 photogram by Heinz Hajek-Halke give us some clues to perhaps his use of some kind of linen or fabric. But from there, the detective work gets quite a bit harder, with layers of intermingled painted/chemical spots and cracks and meshed imprints and patterns creating an sense of intentional instability. In the end, all the tactile interventions resolve into something like visual harmony. Priced at $12000.

Robert Koch Gallery (here): Having recently seen the massive Josef Koudelka prints on view at Pace (reviewed here), this smaller panoramic print from the early 1990s offered up some possibilities for further understanding how Koudelka’s work has evolved. Apparently, luxurious silver prints like this one were made until Koudelka’s printer died, at which point, the artist moved on to the larger pigment prints that are now available. As seen here, the girders elegantly divide the view of the dark heaps, the print giving off a subtle smoothness and gleam that gracefully enhances industrial grimness of the composition. Priced at $35000.