Photography may be the perfect medium for an art fair. It’s passed through so many uses and technologies in its nearly two centuries of life that an exhibition like The Photography Show, sponsored since 1979 by the Association of International Photography Art Dealers, can’t help but be wide-ranging. In this year’s edition at the Park Avenue Armory, you’ll find Désiré Charnay’s earnest black-and-white photos of Vacoa trees in Madagascar (Paul M. Hertzmann, Inc., B13), colorful Op-Art-style abstractions by Jessica Eaton (Higher Pictures, B3), a vast array of photo books and plenty of celebrities, including Abraham Lincoln (19th Century Rare Book & Photograph Shop, C3) and Cindy Crawford (Holden Luntz Gallery, A12).
What you’ll also find, here and there, are artists leveraging photography’s unique position between history and fiction to imagine other worlds, or simply to reveal unsuspected corners of this one. These are eight images that especially caught my eye.
“The Zenith” by Cara Romero
Scheinbaum & Russek Ltd. (C4)
Cara Romero, who was born in Los Angeles and grew up on the Chemehuevi Indian Reservation in California, borrowed a truckload of corn from her family to make this image of the Muscogee-Creek painter George Alexander as a kind of farmer in space. As in her other photos nearby — a woman dressed as a superhero, a wall of bright red bougainvillea behind a boy in feathers and aviators — Romero is using Indigenous Futurism, a science-fiction mash-up of traditional and futuristic imagery, to fire up the viewer’s imagination. Her real subject, though, isn’t what could be in the future but the fertile incongruity of Indigenous life as it already is.
“Pictures from the Archive” by James Barnor
Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière (D10)
This selection of photos by the 95-year-old photographer James Barnor, shot in Ghana and the United Kingdom between 1947 and 1988 in both black-and-white and color, come from a portfolio put together for an exhibition at the Luma Foundation in Arles, France, in 2022. Young boys in patterned shirts and neckties, grinning fishermen, babies showing off and women in glamorous minidresses all seem aware of the camera but unfazed by it, as if they knew just as clearly as we do now that Barnor’s lens would capture the full weight and texture of their lived experience. (The children might have been just a little fazed.)
“Calling Song” by Koyoltzintli
Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery (A3)
An Ecuadorean American New Yorker who works under a name inherited from a shamanic mentor, Koyoltzintli stages performances using instruments she makes herself. But this photo, from her “Adorned With Rattles” series, is more than mere documentation. Capturing the artist in a low squat, with a reflective clay “frog whistle” hiding her face and a dense pattern of mysterious marks behind her, “Calling Song” amounts to a kind of ritual object in itself, suggestive but ambiguous, vividly present but thoroughly evasive.
“Firing Range at Bredelar for Krupp Tank Guns” by Hugo Van Werden
Hans P. Kraus Jr. Inc. (A1)
Part of what makes visual art so exciting is how drastically its meaning can change over time. What must have been a simple record of a tank gun’s accuracy in the 1870s becomes, a century and a half later, in an art fair, a wonderfully evocative near-abstraction — a kind of meditation on random chance that brings to mind an oversize Japanese game board.
“[American Billboards]”
Daniel/Oliver (A11)
Brooklyn’s Daniel/Oliver Gallery has brought to the fair three unusual (and unrelated) groups of photographs from the 1950s: They have hand-colored silver prints of butterflies given away by a profligate French pharmacy, and monochrome, mathematical “Oscillon Electronic Abstractions” by Ben Laposky. But the real eye-grabber is a wall of MetroCard-size color photos of billboards, used as part of an ad agency’s survey of consumer preferences in the same decade. There’s something queasily fascinating about seeing enormous campaigns rendered so tiny and interchangeable. Like that first little boy shouting that the emperor has no clothes in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, it pierces the omnipresent veil of American advertising to reveal just how little there is behind it.
“Xiao Wen Ju with Hokusai’s Great Wave of Kanagawa, Eglingham, Northumberland,” by Tim Walker
Michael Hoppen (A14)
It might sound funny to say, but the most notable quality of Tim Walker’s lush tribute to the 19th century’s most famous woodblock print, which features cardboard waves made in collaboration with the set designer Shona Heath and the fashion model Xiao Wen Ju, is its restraint. The cardboard is frayed enough to give a glimpse of Walker’s process, but not so much as to fetishize its decay; the room is grand, but not overbearing; and the whimsy of the whole thing, its prettiness and just-so-ness and sense of pretend, is leavened by enough dryness of execution to feel actually bracing.
“Dorothy Angola, Stay Free, in Land of the Blacks, Minetta Lane, Village, NYC,” by Nona Faustine
Special Projects (A23)
Nona Faustine’s sometimes shocking, often moving “White Shoes” series involved photographing herself at sites connected with the history of slavery in New York City, where she grew up. In this one, she is thoughtful but self-possessed near a piece of land once inherited by Dorothy Angola, who was brought to New York in the mid-17th century. Faustine died in March at the age of 48; Higher Pictures Gallery is selling this edition of 300, with space donated by AIPAD, to raise money for her family.
Untitled photograph by Jaime Bolotinsky
Vasari (B5)
On display at the Buenos Aires gallery Vasari are several brilliant 1930s-era photographs by Jaime Bolotinsky, a Russian who emigrated to Argentina. Each uses a combination of hats, fabric and adeptly deployed folds and shadows to make a comic, poignant, unforgettable character. One called “El Cocinero,” made with a chef’s toque and a straw hat, looks like an Existentialist muppet, but I chose this untitled print for its exquisite doubleness: You can’t forget that you’re looking at hats, but you can’t stop seeing a face, either.
The Photography Show Presented by AIPAD
Through April 27, Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue, Manhattan; aipad.com.
