This year, The Photography Show presented by AIPAD will take place from April 5th to 8th at Pier 94 in New York. It is one of the oldest photographic fair, and always a place of happenings. Until its opening, The Eye of Photography will publish a selection of souvenirs of the fair collected from participating gallery owners.
– Alex Novak, Contemporary Works, Chalfont: A few years ago an older woman walked into Alan Paviot’s gallery in Paris. She had brought in two marvelous photographs by Man Ray that Alain knew very well. In fact Man Ray had given another Paris gallery, Galerie des 4 Mouvements, a show of these very prints in the 1970s after they had traveled to a half dozen museums.Man Ray had carefully copied his original Rayographs and made one unique enlarged print from each of about 40 key images for the traveling exhibition. Over the years most of the exhibition prints were thought to have been lost or destroyed, but apparently at least a very few still exist. The two that went to Alain Paviot had been given as a gift to the woman directly by Man Ray’s wife Juliet. One other appeared much later at a Paris auction. I bought one of the two prints from Alain and promptly sold it privately. It was resold quickly twice more. Ironically, I was able to buy it back from the government auction of Phil Rivkin’s photo collection, where its uniqueness and importance was apparently not well understood. I showed it publicly for the first and only time at last year’s New York Photography Show presented by AIPAD where it got a tremendous amount of interest and attention. This year I am proud to say that we will be able to add the only other two known prints to exist from Man Ray’s special exhibition group to our exhibit at AIPAD, along with a selection of other important Man Ray photographs. These three unique and very large Rayographs will be spectacular on the wall, and I am very excited to be presenting them for the first time united together at AIPAD.
– Annemarie Zethof and Martijn van Pieterson, Ibasho Gallery, Antwerp: This is an image of a work by Motohiro Takeda that we showed and sold at AIPAD last year. Motohiro is based in New York and produces his camera-less photography in his apartment which he turned into a camera obscura. In this work, he mixes the typical Japanese motive of cherry blossoms with the environment around his Brooklyn apartment. The unique work is created by making a negative image in his camera obscura of the surroundings on four individual sheets of photographic paper that he attaches to the wall of his apartment. The negative image is then used to make a contact print in the dark room with the cherry blossoms in between to create the photogram effect. It was real pleasure to show Motohiro’s work for the first time at AIPAD and we were delighted with the positive response to his magical work. We are showing new work by Motohiro which was created during a residency at Center for Photography in Woodstock in the coming edition of the Photography Show.
– Charlotte Boudon, Galerie Filles du Calvaire, Paris: In 2016, we presented some photographs of Samuel Gratacap, a French photographer who has followed the lives of refugees and migrants crossing the Mediterranean. In his series Empire, focusing on a transit camp in Tunisia closed to the Libyan border, as Bronwyn Law-Viljoen writes in her introduction to Gratacap’s work in Aperture (issue n°222), “There is beauty in his images, but also an attempt to understand the bare-life fact of Choucha, and to avoid consigning the camp’s inhabitants to the realm of the poetic.” We proposed at AIPAD this polyptych Living Choucha, composed of 42 black and white polaroid, showing the refugees’ tents each family got when they arrived in the camp. And how they transformed it to live better in it, in their own ways. Many museums were interested to purchase this unique piece. And a very nice private collector decided to buy it.
– Gary Edwards, Gary Edwards Gallery, Washington DC: This 1852 salt print photograph by Maxime DuCamp is at once one of the earliest made by a European in Egypt, and one of the most remarkable. Its composition, with the artist’s local helper sitting atop the giant sculpture, lends Gallic wit and insouciance to the image of pre-Christian, pre-Islamic sacred art. The photograph was exhibited at Edwards’ booth during the 2000 edition of the Photography Show.
– Roland Angst, Only Photography, Berlin: Last year we did show this series of early vintages by German artist and important collector Wilhelm Schürmann which originally was sold. But after financial problems at the potential institution, we kept this important series and will show it again this year in New York. Together with about a dozen series by artists such as Gerry Johanssson, Kazuo Kitai, Viktor Kolar, Toshio Shibata, Issei Suda and Henry Wessel and others.
