The Photography Show fair’s 45th edition explores medium’s full history from its origins to AI

The Association of International Photography Art Dealers (Aipad) opens the 45th edition of its annual fair, the Photography Show, today (22 April) at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. Around 85% of the fair’s exhibitors are members of the non-profit organisation, while a smaller contingent of non-member exhibitors was selected by the vetting members’ committee. The fair’s main section features around 65 exhibitors, most of whom hail from the US and Europe, while a new sector called Focal Point features 13 exhibitors, each offering solo presentations by artists who have pushed at the boundaries of photography in a layout designed by the Los Angeles- and Mexico City-based design firm Oficina.la.

Returning participants this year include many of New York’s longstanding photography galleries, such as Bruce Silverstein, Clamp, Danziger Gallery, Higher Pictures, Robert Mann Gallery, Yancey Richardson and Howard Greenberg Gallery. Additional US galleries at the fair include the West Coast’s Paul M. Hertzman, Von Lintel Gallery, Scott Nichols and Robert Koch Gallery, as well as Stephen Daiter Gallery from Chicago and The Hulett Collection from Tulsa. First-time exhibitors include Galerie Sophie Scheidecker from Paris and New York’s Leica Gallery; several galleries are returning to the Photography Show after sitting out one or more editions, including Rolf Art from Buenos Aires, Antwerp-based Ibasho and Augusta Edwards Fine Art from London.

“Everybody today carries a camera in their pockets, but we are able to show here the emotional resonance of the medium and what photographers motivated by artistic choices are doing,” Lydia Melamed Johnson, the fair’s executive director, tells The Art Newspaper.

Johnson adds that the medium remains an ideal entry point for collectors who are more likely to take the leap and acquire photographic works as their first purchases, likely in a more approachable price range than a painting or sculpture. “The fair is an ideal start for a young collector to take something home,” Johnson says, though she adds that connoisseurs of the medium and its history will find plenty to entice them, too. “We have a work in the range of a couple of hundreds of dollar not far from a rare Man Ray.”

According to Johnson, the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) to generate photorealistic images has only helped clarify photography’s importance. “Photography has a long history of being the technological medium and, in many ways, leading the charge,” she says, while also warning that “there needs to be a clear understanding of what is created by the human and what intentional choices were made by the artist”.

That enormous diversity within a single medium is one of the Photography Show’s main selling points. Johnson points to the “encyclopaedic” quality of this year’s offerings, which trace photography’s 200-year history from early plates to the “tools of tomorrow”.

The fair’s breadth of material has kept the London-based gallery HackelBury coming back for 25 years. At this week’s edition, it is showing a group presentation that features a recent mixed-media photographic work from the New York duo Doug and Mike Starn’s Under the Sky series. The inkjet print photograph’s painterly appearance results from the artists’ application of acrylic paint, varnish and wax onto the initial image of a blue sky on the gelatin hand-coated paper. “There is a reference to Old Master paintings but their work is never about perfection, so it asks to be seen in person,” says Marcus Bury, HackelBury’s co-founder (and a past Aipad board member).

The New York-based dealer Howard Greenberg has dedicated his gallery’s stand to a solo presentation by the pioneering American street photographer Joel Meyerowitz. The selection of colour photographs from 1960s and 70s coincides with the International Center of Photography’s upcoming gala (28 April), at which the Bronx-born, 88-year-old artist will receive a lifetime achievement award. Greenberg highlights Meyerowitz’s instrumental role in introducing colour to the world of fine art photography when the artist’s contemporaries such as William Eggleston and Stephen Shore favoured black-and-white imagery.

“Colour photography was only the domain of advertising, fashion and National Geographic-style work, and Joel convinced his peers that colour was a viable medium,” Greenberg says, adding that his gallery’s presentation “shows how he was the catalyst and energiser for what was to come”. Two photographs from the mid-1960s featuring young beachgoers at Coney Island in Brooklyn encapsulate the city on the cusp of a cultural transformation and, according to the Greenberg, demonstrate how Meyerowitz pulled “art photography out of the constraints of black and white”.

Photographic legacies also inform the offerings from Rolf Gallery of Buenos Aires, whose stand is dedicated to Argentinian women photographers of the 20th century. Sara Facio and Alicia D’Amico, who met in 1955 when they were both studying in Paris, created an energetic and collaborative body of work focused on Argentina’s transforming cultural landscape during the 1970s. The gallery exhibits the late artists’ three collaborative series, including a group of portraits from 1974 that depict the Buenos Aires intelligentsia and a visual essay, Humanario (1976), with photos taken at the Borda Psychiatric Hospital on a commission from the country’s Ministry of Health. (The gallery’s stand also includes works by Adriana Lestido.)

Rolf Gallery's founder Florencia Giordana Braun says the decision to return to the Photography Show after a six-year hiatus was a “strategic decision to re-engage with more specialised fairs”. She says the “art fair landscape becoming increasingly saturated and overlapping” has renewed the appeal of fairs that offer a “unique context where photography is not only central but deeply understood”.

That dynamic—an educated roster of dealers catering to an informed audience of private and institutional visitors—remains core to the fair’s success. “Our nonprofit leg and internal vetting process helps us be in the service of the photographic medium and respond to our institutional partners’ expectations,” Johnson says. This year’s special programmes support the director’s sentiment with a variety of talks on topics that range from AI’s impacts on the medium to the history of photojournalism in the US and the medium’s importance for the practice of artist Laurie Simmons, in her own words.

• The Photography Show presented by Aipad, 22-26 April, Park Avenue Armory, New York