AIPAD 2005.

As photographic fairs organized by or for photo dealers and their potential customers prosper around the United States and in Europe, the oldest of them all, the Photographic Show sponsored by the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) celebrated its twenty-fifth birthday February 10-13, 2005 in New York City.

After Photo LA and Photo San Francisco, Fall 2004 saw the birth of Photo New York, all instigated by the Stephen Cohen Gallery. In England, the second Photo London will take place May 19-22, 2005. Four months after Photo New York, and three months after a very successful Paris Photo, AIPAD's Photographic Show opened its doors to over 80 international galleries and dealers, most from the U.S. Although attendance was far from matching the crowds seen in Paris, AIPAD's Photographic Show, focusing mainly on the dealers' market, drew more visitors than the new Photo New York, which had also invited photo-book publishers and distributors, as its panel discussion "The Evolution of Photography in Print" attested. Photographic shows provide an opportunity to see how the market is evolving and who, among the now vast list of photographers available, is "doing well"--in other words, selling well. For the cynic, the sudden increase in the price of the work of particular photographers may be a sign that they have had a recent show in a major institution, or more simply that they have recently died. Such was the case for Henri Cartier-Bresson this year. One could hardly locate a modern print--we are not even speaking of vintage prints from the 1930s here--under $10,000. If anyone could even doubt that art is a market where supply and demand play a leading role, there is the evidence: the only good photographer for the market is a dead one.

Generally speaking, prices for prints were on the rise at AIPAD 2005, except for those already highly priced. Landscapes by Carleton Watkins (except for a $75,000 albumen print at the Robert Klein Gallery) or views of old Paris by Eugene Atget did not seem to have gained monetary value whereas contemporary photographers whose work is usually priced between $1500 and $15,000 had. Large color prints reaching five or six figures were absent and works by Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall and Nan Goldin were not seen. Even Richard Misrach's work had disappeared from the booths except for two black and white split-tone prints from the 1970s at $12,000 and $15,000, respectively.

As expected AIPAD 2005 was rather classical in the choice of the works exhibited. Black and white silver-based photography still has a good exposure and audience, a trend that is quite different from the one illustrated in Paris where color work and above all digital/ink-jet prints seemed to be the norm. The market surely has its reasons but I still have a hard time figuring out why superb prints by Aaron Siskind stagnate while prints from the Farm Security Administration of the 1930s, some of them directly available at more than reasonable prices from the Library of Congress, increase in prices and number in galleries. French black and white "humanistic" photography is on the rise too and along with Cartier-Bresson, the works of Edouard Boubat, Robert Doisneau and Willy Ronis were present in numerous booths.

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AIPAD is and should be an opportunity for galleries to show some of their new photographers. In recent years the Candace Perich Gallery introduced us to Penti Sammallahti and Bogdan Konopka. In 2005 the work of Simon Norfolk was represented by Bonni Benrubi Gallery and Gallery Luisotti (Santa Monica) and the Robert Mann Gallery, which seems to regularly introduce contemporary British color photography to an American audience, featured Stephen Hughes' work. One interesting discovery this year was the work of two master printers in the platinum/palladium process: Koichiro Kurita and his student Ryuijie. Their delicate and exquisite prints, some of which use gampi paper as their base, sell for very reasonable prices, an opportunity that may not last. And last but not least in the list of happy encounters at AIPAD was new work by Larry Towell that will be on exhibit at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris next April. The Walls of No-Man's Land: Palestine started as a project that won the first Cartier-Bresson Prize in 2003 and will be released as a book at the time of the opening of the show. A portion of the work will also be exhibited at the Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto next May. With this new body of work, and following in the steps of Josef Koudelka, his colleague at Magnum, Towell achieves striking results with his recent use of a panoramic camera that will probably establish his work as one of the highlights of 2005.

For several years AIPAD has had a special committee focusing on the organization of educational programs during the show. William Hunt supervised this year's lecture series: an evening in the memory of Helen Gee and the Limelight Gallery, a presentation of the photographic collections of the midwest, and an evocation of Cartier-Bresson's life and work. As a comparison, Photo New York had invited two photographers, Larry Fink and Joel Peter Witkin, to give presentations on their respective works. Attendance at AIPAD's lectures had decreased last year, especially when compared to the previous year when Struth gave an extremely well-attended presentation in the wake of his retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This year's events confirmed the trend noticed in 2004. Except for the emotion triggered by remembrances of Gee, a few anecdotes and a debate between Joel Meyerowitz and Susan Meiselas on the comparative virtues of working as a lone American photographer, or for an international cooperative of photographers, the presentations were well-spirited but unfortunately uninspired and uninspiring.

BRUNO CHALIFOUR is a freelance critic and photographer, educator and PhD candidate.