AIPAD Show

I plan on attending the AIPAD show at the Park Avenue Armory in NYC, probably on Thursday. Anyone else planning to attend? If so, it would be fun to meet some of you in person.

For those unfamiliar with AIPAD, it is the Association of International Photography Art Dealers, and they hold a major show in NYC each year. Much of the work is museum grade; if you have the money you can walk out with pretty much any image you have seen in a History of Photography anthology, starting with the photographers of the late 1800s, right through those photographers producing new work today. It actually amounts to a better exhibition than most museums. The show starts on Thursday May 16 and runs through Sunday.

Peter, relating to your recent reading of the Group f/64 book (Alinder), Booth #112 will have work of interest. Scott Nichols exhibits Cunningham, Adams, Lange, Stackpole, Weston (father and son) and some wonderful contributions from those they influenced. Hope you give us a report after your visit.

Might be there sometime this week.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Merg Ross

Peter, relating to your recent reading of the Group f/64 book (Alinder), Booth #112 will have work of interest. Scott Nichols exhibits Cunningham, Adams, Lange, Stackpole, Weston (father and son) and some wonderful contributions from those they influenced. Hope you give us a report after your visit.

---

Merg: I will definitely report back, although I feel slightly :) intimidated by the greater depth of knowledge from many others posting, and those like yourself who actually knew some of the photographers you mention! When you referred to the Alinder book, the first thing I thought was how amazed those first members of Group f.64 would be, after their arduous fight to get photography recognized as a gallery- and museum-worthy art form, to see AIPAD with its 123 world-wide members who make their living as fine-art photography dealers.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Peter Lewin

Merg: I will definitely report back, although I feel slightly :) intimidated by the greater depth of knowledge from many others posting, and those like yourself who actually knew some of the photographers you mention! When you referred to the Alinder book, the first thing I thought was how amazed those first members of Group f.64 would be, after their arduous fight to get photography recognized as a gallery- and museum-worthy art form, to see AIPAD with its 123 world-wide members who make their living as fine-art photography dealers.

---

Peter, no need to feel intimidated by the limited knowledge posted here. None of those I knew, mentioned above, were themselves the least bit intimidating. They all had one thing in common, passion for their love of the medium.

There are some forgotten heroes between the time of Group f.64 and the later (1970's) recognition, promotion and acceptance of photography as an art form. In no particular order I would note, Beaumont Newhall, David McAlpin, Ansel, Helen Gee, Carl Siembab, John Szarkowski, Hugh Edwards, Ivan Dmitri and Helen Johnston. AIPAD came after the "fight", as you characterize it.

I hope you have an opportunity to talk to Scott Nichols at a quiet moment, please say hello for me. Have fun, we await your report.

Thanks for the heads up, I just bought my ticket! I thought I had put it in my calendar but I guess I forgot. AIPAD is a show where you get to see the real prints, and even handle them. If you've got your credit card, you can buy some of them. ;-)

I SHOULD be there tomorrow, anyone want to meet?

On the train to the show, if anyone would like to meet up I should be there around 4pm-8pm or so.

Using Merg’s post as an excuse to write, first a sense of scale. Over 80 dealers had works hanging on the walls, and bins with more mounted & matted work. I spent a solid 5 hours viewing only the works hanging up and skipping booths which looked uninteresting. To view every booth, and to look at work which wasn’t on the walls, would have taken days. For you to read about everything I liked would also take days!

Surprisingly, many of the classics no longer seemed as wonderful to me as they used to. I’ve already posted some thoughts in the AA thread. While I was no longer taken by Edward Weston’s famous Pepper, or his Nautilus, or even some of his famous nudes, one, “Nude 1918” http://nothinking.tumblr.com/post/13...st-nude-weston struck me as special, as well as Steichen’s “Portrait of Mary Steichen, 1915” https://www.pinterest.com/pin/513621532476093126/. (a mere $95,000.)

In my notes I wrote “Wynn Bullock–more appealing than the Ansel Adams work hanging alongside,” and often a print that beckoned me turned out to be by Minor White. (I realize the subject matter and styles are not comparable, I just made notes about what attracted me and what didn’t.)

An interesting quartet grouped a landscape by Robert Adams, two prints from the 1800s (Roger Fenton and Henry Le Secq), and an unexpected Imogene Cunningham, “Reflections, Sudbury Hill” http://www.imogencunningham.com/page...=INA12&index=0

Ian Ruhter had one of his large wet plate images for sale, “Yosemite Tunnel View” (I can’t find a direct link, go to http://www.ianruhter.com/), either the wet plate original, or an even larger digitally printed version. The gallery manager and I both agreed that the digital copy looked better than the original, I guess post-processing even helps with wet plate! Other more contemporary LF photographers I liked included Chris Killip and John Davies, both British.

As a NJ resident, I also enjoyed works from our patron saint, George Tice, although it looked like there were a few too many copies of “Petit’s Garage” http://www.nj.com/entertainment/inde...orge_tice.html around the floor.

Which brought me to a thought for which I will probably be tarred-and-feathered: if not for the fame attached to the photographer, many of the prints didn’t look that much better than images made by us on this forum. I have some of my own prints hanging alongside prints by John Sexton, Sally Mann, Linda Connor, Stu Levy, and others. My non-photography-enthusiast friends don’t notice the difference between my prints and those by the much better photographers, and wouldn’t even notice if a Weston were added in. Its not that the prints on sale weren’t great, but they didn’t seem 5-figures better, once you removed the “Wow, I saw that in this anthology, or I saw that one hanging at the Metropolitan” factor.

I just got back from the show. I agree that there were a lot of excellent prints by Minor White. There were some beautiful prints by Paul Caponigro, the apple, the two pears, and the river in Redding.

I was delighted to meet Flor Garduño, the photographer who produced Witnesses of Time, http://www.amazon.com/Flor-Garduño-W.../dp/0893819190 Her prints are stunning, with a wonderful feeling of light. She told me she does all her own printing and shoots with a Leica.

Other memorable work included photographs by Gordon Parks, both black and white and color work. There were quite a few photographs by Josef Sudek. I found a few prints by W. Eugene Smith, including one of Smith hanging off of a fire escape, and one of him in his cluttered loft. I found a portrait of Smith in a thrift store in New York and need to discover the photographer. One portrait appears to be of Jay Maisel, and one is of Smith, so I speculate that Maisel took both photographs.

Let's see, I love the work of Helen Levitt, there were a lot of her pictures there, including a nice print of the kids playing with a broken mirror.

More will come to me but I need to stare at a white wall for a while to recover. Oh, I got to meet Stone, that was fun.