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.
Cara Romero‘s “The Zenith,” 2022, depicting the Muscogee-Creek painter George Alexander as a kind of farmer in space.Credit…via Cara Romero and Scheinbaum & Russek
“The Zenith” by Cara Romero
Scheinbaum & Russek Ltd. (C4)
Cara Romero, an enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Tribe who grew up in Los Angeles, 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.
James Barnor, “Patrick Chinery and Peter Swaniker in matching outfits,” Accra, circa 1980.Credit…via Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière
“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.)
