The Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) will debut a new art fair, The AIPAD Photography Show Miami, from Wednesday, December 5 through Sunday, December 9, 2007, and will open with an invitational preview tonight, Tuesday, December 4, from 6 to 10 p.m.

Forty-three of the world's leading fine art photography galleries will present a wide range of museum quality work by 19th-century, modern and contemporary masters. The exhibition will be held at a tented venue located at NW 31st Street and North Miami Avenue in the Wynwood Art District of Miami, FL. The show will be held side-by-side with Photo Miami, and the combined venues will feature well over 100 photography booths, making the dual venue the largest showing of photography in the world. The show hours are coordinated so that you can easily visit both venues.

The regular show hours will be this Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.; and Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.; and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. More information is also posted up on the AIPAD website at: http://www.aipad.com/photoshow/ .

AIPAD is well known for the prestigious fair, the AIPAD Photography Show New York, which is held at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City in April. The new dates for the 28th edition of the fair in New York are April 10-13, 2008. The AIPAD Photography Show is the longest running and foremost exhibition of fine art photography.

The following galleries will be exhibiting at the AIPAD venue: Nailya Alexander, New York, NY; Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; Stephen Cohen Gallery, Inc., Los Angeles, CA; Contemporary Works / Vintage Works, Ltd., Chalfont, PA; Czech Center of Photography, Prague, Czech Republic; Stephen Daiter Gallery / Daiter Contemporary, Chicago, IL; David Gallery, Culver City, CA; Michael Dawson Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Keith de Lellis Gallery, New York, NY; Candace Dwan Gallery, New York, NY; Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago, IL; Etherton Gallery, Tucson, AZ; Kathleen Ewing Gallery, Washington, DC; Gitterman Gallery, New York, NY; Fay Gold Gallery, Atlanta, GA; HackelBury Fine Art Limited, London, England; The Halsted Gallery, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Charles A. Hartman Fine Art, Portland, OR; Hasted Hunt Gallery, New York, NY; Charles Isaacs Photographs, Inc., New York, NY; Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta, GA; Steven Kasher Gallery, New York, NY; Robert Klein Gallery, Boston, MA; Alan Klotz Gallery, New York, NY; Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Baudoin Lebon, Paris, France; Janet Lehr, Inc., New York, NY: Lee Marks Fine Art, Shelbyville, IN; Scott Nichols Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Galerie Priska Pasquer, Cologne, Germany; Photographs Do Not Bend Gallery, Dallas, TX; Scheinbaum & Russek. Ltd., Santa Fe, NM; Howard Schickler Fine Art, Sarasota FL; Michael Shapiro Photographs, San Francisco, CA; Silverstein Photography, New York, NY; Barry Singer Gallery, Petaluma, CA; Andrew Smith Gallery, Inc., Santa Fe, NM; Joel Soroka Gallery, Aspen, CO; Staley-Wise Gallery, New York, NY; Galerie Zur Stockeregg, Switzerland; Throckmorton Fine Art, Inc., New York, NY; Wach Gallery, Avon Lake, OH; Winter Works on Paper, New York, NY.

Contemporary Works/Vintage Works will be one of the exhibitors here in Miami. You can see us at the very back left of the exhibition near the back lounge area in booths 117 and 118. Most of our featured contemporary artists are expected to be in attendance at various times during the show. Their images are on our website at http://.www.contemporaryworks.net . The artists attending will include, Arthur Tress, Michael Smith, Lisa Holden, Claudia Kunin, Vladimir Birgus and Michael Philip Manheim. Stop by the booth to check on the days that they will be attending. Most will be there from Dec.4 or 5 through Dec. 9.

We will also show a key selection of top 20th-century vintage masterworks, including work from Irving Penn, Man Ray, Raul Ubac, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Francois Kollar, Brassai, Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Kertesz, Walker Evans, Horst, Josef Sudek, Edward Weston, Doris Ulman, Lewis Hine and Edouard Boubat. In addition we will have several important portfolios and books, including one of Manuel Alverez Bravo's work (and printed by him) and a pigment print portfolio of Frantisek Drtikol for sale at the show. Also ask to see our latest "finds" which we will show to our special clients who are newsletter readers. We will also have a number of new 19th-century masterworks, but these will be "underneath" or in our closet, so you will have to ask to see them.

 

The special End-of-the-Year Holiday sale on I Photo Central, brought to you by all of the website's photography dealers, is coming to a close in less than two weeks. These items are available at special sale prices (from 20 to over 60% off the regular list price) only until December 15th. Many of the items' regular list prices were reduced earlier, so the actual net reductions may be well over 40% to 80% in many instances. These are all final prices, so no other discounts apply. Shipping/insurance will also be added, plus you will be responsible for any applicable taxes or customs fees.

There are some great deals, so check them out soon at: http://www.iphotocentral.com/sale/sale.php .

If you want to do further sorts on the sale list, you can go to the Search Images page at http://www.iphotocentral.com/search/search.php and put HolidaySale1 into the key word field. Then you can also use the other search fields, such as price range, country, date range, etc. When you have all your choices made, simply hit the Search button (not the Show All Images button). When you put in the key word, you must have the capital letters in properly and no space between the words or the number "1". Also make sure you do not have any extra space after the key word. This way if you are bargain hunting, you can put in a range from $1 to $500, or if you want to focus on the top end, just put in a range from $1000 (or $5000) to No Limit.

We are also running a special Holiday Book Sale offer on most of the books posted up on line at a 20% discount price. You will also save shipping costs if you order $250 or more per dealer. There are many very low priced photography books listed on the site that can fill in your library or make great holiday presents. And many more books will be added to the list over the next month (and beyond), so keep checking back.

The Book Sale can also be found at: http://www.iphotocentral.com/sale/sale.php .

While the books can be searched on the regular Search pages with the drop-down menu on media (just select "books"), we expect to soon have an entirely separate photography bookstore--the first such multi-dealer version on the web.

I encourage bookstores with a photography orientation to contact me at 1-215-822-5662 for details on how to join I Photo Central and put inventory into this new internet resource. And I encourage our newsletter readers to go and see the many rare photography books currently on sale on the site. Many are rare first editioned and signed copies. Others will make great additions to any research library.

 

During the last month nearly 200 new photographs have been added to the I Photo Central website, including many classics. Plus, numerous Special Exhibits have also been added. To see everything that has been added, click here: http://www.iphotocentral.com/search/result_list.php/16/30/0 .

Some of the 19th-century works include: a colored ¼-plate ambrotype of a photographer mixing chemicals (plus several other nice hard images); a tree study by Eugene Cuvalier; Pietro Dovizielli's famed "Cascade delle Ferriere, Tivoli"; a salt print of the Temple of Fortuna Virilis (Temple of Portunus), Rome by Eugene Constant; three nude studies by Auguste Belloc; a beautiful salt portrait by Adam-Salomon; a very large Le Gray of the Pavilion Sully at the New Palais du Louvre; three very important Felix Teynard's of Egypt that were printed outside of the normal H. de Fonteny edition; a magical salt print of Sheep and a Peasant Girl; and a stunning salt print by Baldus (fabulous color) of the Old Hotel de Ville from the Pont d'Arcole. To see all the 19th-century work added recently in the last month, just click http://www.iphotocentral.com/search/result_list.php/17/0/1840/1899/30/0 . We will have some additional images not yet up on the site at AIPAD Photography Miami show this week.

Twentieth-century works include: a very early and important Robert Frank print of the rare "Butte, MT" image from "The Americans"; lots of Max Waldman images (we received two new collections of his work); another great group of ballet images from Kim Camba; many of Robert Doisneau's key images; a large group of Helen Levitt's, both vintage and printed later; some really great images from Cartier-Bresson, Edgerton, Morgan, Atget, Kertesz, Bourke-White, Boubat, Korda, Halsman,Webb and Albin-Guillot. To see all the 20th-century work added recently in the last month, just click: http://www.iphotocentral.com/search/result_list.php/17/0/1900/1989/30/0 . Again, we still have lots more to post up to the site, so ask us about the new work at the AIPAD Photography Miami show this week.

New contemporary works by Arthur Tress, Claudia Kunin and Claudia Kunin have also been added to the I Photo Central website and their respective Special Exhibits.

Several new Special Exhibits have also been added to the website, including the following:

Ambrotype: Glass Images of a Fragile World http://www.iphotocentral.com/showcase/showcase_view.php/172/1/1 .

Arthur Tress: Pointer Series http://www.iphotocentral.com/showcase/showcase_view.php/160/1/0 .

Historic New York Subway Images, Documents of Construction, Circa 1900
http://www.iphotocentral.com/showcase/showcase_view.php/167/3/0 .

Max Waldman: Stunning Dance, Theater, Nudes and Portraits http://www.iphotocentral.com/showcase/showcase_view.php/171/1/1 .

Tintypes: A Quirky History on Metal http://www.iphotocentral.com/showcase/showcase_view.php/173/1/0 .

Of course, lots of other new photographs have been added to the current Special Exhibits, so you should check them all out by going here: http://www.iphotocentral.com/showcase/showcase.php . There are not only photographs for sale, but also in-depth essays that accompany each Photo Exhibit.

 

By Matt Damsker

WESTON PORTFOLIO: SAN FRANCISCO; WHITE SANDS; NEW YORK.
Volumes 1-3 of a 19-volume portfolio of the photographs of Brett Weston. From the collection of Scott F. Nichols. Essays by Roger Aiken, Softcover edition of 1,000; numbered hardcover edition of 250. Lodima Press, P.O. Box 367, Revere, PA 18953 USA. Phone: +1-610-847-2007; fax: +1-610-847-2373; email: info@lodimapress.com; Web: http://www.lodimapress.com .

Brett Weston's 16 limited-edition portfolios of original photographs were produced between 1939 and 1980, and they are understandably hard to come by today. Lodima Press is thus publishing a new 19-volume series of Weston portfolios over the course of the next several years, and these first three editions give a fine accounting not only of Weston's important early work but also of Lodima's commitment to quality in this important project.

The photos have been printed in Belgium by Salto in 600-line screen quadtones on heavily coated stock, many of them reproduced in their actual size, with the colors of each book cover selected to match the covers of the original portfolio cases. And the essays by Roger Aiken--an expert on both Brett and his father, Edward--provide important context. Ultimately, of course, the photographs speak for themselves as sensitive documents of time and place, and these first three portfolios have the effect of moving us across America--from left to right, as it were--beginning with Weston's wonderful views of 1939 San Francisco in its transition from gold-rush town to urban Mecca.

Thus, several of these shots, from a high vantage, depict the squat housing and modest buildings sprawled along the hills and coastlines, with dramatic skies and horizon lines. Weston's image of the Golden Gate Bridge, shot from sea level and projecting in a powerful diagonal from the lower right to upper left of the frame, against a twilit sky, is nothing less than iconic, conveying at once the majesty of the bridge as both secular temple and marvel of modern engineering. In all of the shots, an eye for telling detail combines with a muted, richly shadowed tonality to convey a moody ambivalence about the price of urbanism in such a splendid environment.

Moving eastward, then, Weston's 1949 portfolio (with some 1976 images as well) of the gypsum dunes of White Sands National Monument in New Mexico are where he connects most closely with the natural abstraction of his father's most emblematic work. But where Edward Weston typically sought to express the purest form of sand dunes, Brett seeks the larger context, with horizon, scrub vegetation and shadow combining to render the complexity of these spare landscapes.

And by the time his camera encounters New York City, in 1951, the result is a 12-photography portfolio that marries Manhattan's visual complexity to Weston's mature style. Indeed, these glorious cityscapes build powerfully upon the San Francisco images of more than a decade earlier, as skyscrapers obliterate the horizon line and Weston takes in the extraordinary angularity, geometric dazzle, and human implications of America's true metropolis. Thus, the romance of the Brooklyn Bridge is viewed not in the solitary splendor that Weston brought to his image of the Golden Gate, but is instead overlapped by the sight of a four-story New York apartment building-cum-saloon, with automobiles parked in an anxious gaggle to the bottom left of the crammed frame. As Aiken points out, the image evokes and equals Edward Hopper's paintings of urban loneliness.

Obviously, New York challenged and delighted Weston in many ways. Focusing on doorways and windows in close up, he captured fine textures and details--trees sprouting from concrete corners, wrought iron railings--while amidst overweening architecture and urban clutter, he located people made small yet indomitably coping, as in the classic shot of a lone man reading a newspaper glimpsed from high above a canyon of brick wall and forbidding rooftops. And Weston's portrait of a weathered old seafaring man seated in a rowboat on some ramshackle edge of the island is a masterpiece. As with so many of these images, one can look at it repeatedly and see more each time.


LODIMA PRESS PORTFOLIO BOOK SERIES.
A Nine-Volume Series Of The Works Of Nicholas Nixon, Carl Chiarenza, George Tice, Keith Carter, Linda Connor, Larry Fink, Arthur Tress, Marilyn Bridges, And Paul Capinigro. Softcover edition of 1,000; numbered hardcover edition of 100. Lodima Press, P.O. Box 367, Revere, PA 18953 USA. Phone: +1-610-847-2007; fax: +1-610-847-2373; email: info@lodimapress.com; Web: http://www.lodimapress.com .

Amidst its revival and first-rate reproduction of Brett Weston's classic photographic portfolios, Lodima Press has also issued a black-and-white portfolio series of works by leading and emerging contemporary photographers (also printed in fine, 600-line screen quadtone by Salto).

These nine portfolios range from the domestic details and quirky viewpoints of Nicholas Nixon to Paul Caponigro's timeless textural portraits of the Stone Churches of Ireland. In between are strong and varied photographic visions--the abstractions of Carl Chiarenza, for example, explore cut paper designs; George Tice offers the downscale urban landscapes of New Jersey; Keith Carter dreamily, erotically and compassionately depicts his nudes in a number of studio and natural settings; Linda Connor echoes Caponigro's stone churches with her mysterious evocations of Turkey's early Christian chapels and monasteries; Larry Fink locates the praying mantis in its camouflaged predation in hills and fields; Arthur Tress's "Planets" are everyday textures and surfaces--water, dirt, rock, floorboard--made cosmically strange through the disc-like circumference of his flipped-over Hasselblad lens shade; and Marilyn Bridges high, bird's-eye views of world landscapes--from Buffalo herds in Botswana to Roman ruins, the Nevada desert, Central Park, or a Viking burial site in Denmark--depict time and earth in tandem.

Each of these portfolios stands well enough on its own, of course, but as part of this ambitious Lodima series, the individual oeuvres reflect strongly on each other, not only in the obvious pairing of Caponigro's and Connor's church studies but also in the sensuality with which, say, Keith Carter fashions his nude studies and Larry Fink eavesdrops on the pure insectine existence of the praying mantis. Similarly, Tress's "Planets" and Chiarenza's Matisse-like collaging of glossy paper, all edges and roundings, rich with contrast and complexity, seem to complement each other while offering very different visual experiences. And George Tice's views of a New Jersey that seems to define itself in the water towers of Sayreville and Wildwood, in liquor stores and motels, is somehow balanced by Nicholas Nixon's quietly vacant views of suburban domesticity, an Eggleston-like glimpse of the fleeting and seemingly random play of objects and light. In all, Lodima has achieved a lot with these sensitively staged little books.


Matt Damsker is an author and critic, who has written about photography and the arts for the Los Angeles Times, Hartford Courant, Philadelphia Bulletin, Rolling Stone magazine and other publications. His book, "Rock Voices", was published in 1981 by St. Martin's Press. His essay in the book, "Marcus Doyle: Night Vision" was published this past November.

(Book publishers, authors and photography galleries/dealers may send review copies to us at: I Photo Central, 258 Inverness Circle, Chalfont, PA 18914. We do not guarantee that we will review all books or catalogues that we receive.)