Esther Schipper (here): With a MoMA survey now on view, Rosa Barba’s visibility is certainly on the rise. This 2025 work finds the Italian artist playing with film clips and motion, with images of colored glass turned into strips, which then rotate on rollers, creating an ever changing abstraction of shifting colors. Priced at $100000.
Frith Street Gallery (here): Having already reclaimed the center of the gallery with her elegantly modular wooden structures, Dayanita Singh has moved back the flatness of the wall with this recent array of images. The Indian photographer’s work has often explored the tactile surfaces and ordered arrangements of archives, books, papers, and files as her visual subject, and this gathering of images travels some of those same pathways, evoking the scent of the stacks with the inclusion of a rose with papery petals. Priced at £90000.
Vermelho (here): In this grid of works, the Brazilian artist Rosângela Rennó reworks archival Cuban wedding photos taken at the moment of farewell or departure. Made for a Cuban museum exhibition several decades ago, the original prints have continued to age and decay (and have since been reprinted), adding additional layers of nostalgia and memory to the original conceptual exercise. Priced at $28000 for the set of 4 prints.
The Modern Institute (here): Following a recent gallery exhibit of Anne Collier’s work (with many last prints in the edition from across her career), this 2009 image features Cindy Sherman and layers of inversions of male/female gaze. Shot by Mark Seliger for the men’s magazine L’Uomo, Sherman is styled with monochrome severity and a melancholy cigarette. The cover feels like a perfect photo-artifact for Collier to reconsider, shifting the gaze once again. Priced at $40000 and already sold.
David Zwirner (here): Hung on the outside of the Zwirner booth, this set of Sherrie Levine appropriations of Alfred Stieglitz’ equivalents initially tricked me. This image is particularly misty and abstract, the subtle effect of reprinting amplifying its feeling of ephemerality, but of course, the main conceptual switch is the vantage point of the gaze, with Levine unpacking Stieglitz and his originality. Priced at $180000 for a set of 5 prints.
Southern Guild (here): Zanele Muholi’s self-portraits have often used extremes of light and dark contrast to amplify their visual power, so it’s not entirely surprising that she would try out backlit lightboxes as a method for further pushing on these contrasts. A recent exhibition at SCAD offered the opportunity to experiment with this format, as seen in this work where the textural safety pins and patterned rug have even more punch than usual. Priced at $30000.
Stevenson Gallery (here): Frida Orupabo’s large-scale collaged figures continue to impress. This 2015 construction from the Nigerian-Norwegian artist deftly plays with textures and image watermarks, creating a hybrid archival figure who peers at us with piercing clarity. Color makes a subtle appearance here (her works are largely monochrome), adding to the sense of aggregate approximation. Priced at $36000.
Hales Gallery (here): Andrea Geyer has been making cut image interventions for many years now, and this 2025 work is a knockout example of how her geometries can smartly interrupt and rearrange a figure. Her subject is Zitkála-Šá (“Red Bird”), an Indigenous activist of the early 20th century, as originally seen by Gertrude Käsebier. Geyer’s re-interpretation breaks the elegant profile portrait into geometric shards, which are reshuffled into a brashly multi-faceted and unstable pattern. Priced at $16000.
Hauser & Wirth (here): The outside wall of this booth featured a gathering of new collages by Lorna Simpson. The works combining black female faces with rock specimens were the strongest of the group, turning crystals and formations from book plates into elaborately ornate hairstyles, and adding a stylish undercurrent of geological solidity and strength to the personalities. Priced at $35000 and already sold.
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (here): These new works by Lisa Oppenheim take Edward Steichen as an inspiration, in particular his interest in flowers. The images imagine the now-extinct “Monsieur Steichen” iris (named by a French botanist in honor of the photographer) using a little help from AI to create the visual hybrids, and then Oppenheim has printed the results as bold, almost psychedelic dye transfers, a process Steichen used himself in the 1930s and 1940s. With colors that warp and seethe in impossible combinations, the photographs feel eerily experimental. Priced at $12000 each.
303 Gallery (here): If we’re being strict in our definitions, this recent painting by Sam Falls isn’t exactly photography, although it employs a photogram-like technique – earlier in his career Falls used photography more often, which is perhaps why I continue to want to keep his work inside the big tent of the medium. Here he places layers of leaves on the canvas, and uses pigments and rainfall to activate the silhouetting process, creating an expressive combination of ghostly overlapped forms. Priced at $85000.
Frith Street Gallery (here): The British photographer John Riddy was a new discovery for me at this year’s fair. This intricately textural tree scene was made following Cezanne’s footsteps through the south of France. Up close, it’s a delicate marvel, almost like an etching, with filigrees of branches covering the image from edge to edge. Priced at £5000.
Southern Guild (here): Alex Hedison’s work was another find for me this year. This work (from 2017) is essentially a found abstraction, documenting storefront windows gesturally washed over with paint and interrupted by hanging strips of plastic and shadows. The image is both disorienting and vaguely recognizable, successfully drifting between representation and mystery. Priced at $16000.
Hales Gallery (here): This image comes from series of works made in the early 1980s by Sunil Gupta on a commission from the Photographers’ Gallery. The concept was to capture the overlooked experience of gay Indian men, which at the time hadn’t been given much photographic attention. The vulnerability of living in a largely repressive environment is powerfully felt in this quietly resigned setup, where the single figure in orange is surrounded by the bulk of history and contemplates the difference between his reality and that of gay men in the West (in the caption). Priced at $7000.
Hales Gallery (here): This angelic 1990 image by Tessa Boffin is part of a larger work titled “The Knight’s Move” which reimagines scenes of knights and courtiers with an all lesbian cast. The British artist was a champion of lesbian visibility and directly addressed the AIDS crisis in her work before she died in 1993 (with her friend Sunil Gupta taking charge of her artistic estate). Her singular angel here feels calmly romantic, a figure of fantasy given a graceful physical presence. Priced at $9000.
303 Gallery (here): Doug Aitken has been making round lightbox transparencies for half a dozen years now, and his newest series of images leans further toward the motifs of western Americana. Here a big sky lingers over a low slung building and a covered El Camino, with “No More Rock and Roll” printed on the garage door, mixing simple geometries and casual wordplay. Priced at $150000.
