10 Must-See Artists at AIPAD’s Photography Show

Alina Cohen, Artsy, April 4, 2019

The 39th edition of The Photography Show, presented by AIPAD, features work from a roster of artists as diverse as the images they shoot. Experimental frames bump up against traditional portraiture, and subjects range from contemporary to classic, including surfers captured by teenage photographer Joey Farrell and black-and-white cityscapes by the late master Walker Evans. The pictures on view at New York’s Pier 94 April 4th through 7th offer glimpses into disparate lives, times, and modalities. You can, of course, find plenty of famous Weegee and Diane Arbus  images; and when you visit, Alec Soth may be sitting on a couch within the special exhibition he curated, which focuses on domestic portraits and interiors. Yet we’ve rounded up 10 new discoveries—rising talents that are just beginning to infiltrate the canon.

 

ICE WATER, 2016

©Keris Salmon ICE WATER, 2016

 

After an illustrious career producing for Dateline, MSNBC, and National Geographic, Keris Salmon turned her storytelling drive toward photography. For her 2016 series “We Have Made These Lands What They Are: The Architecture of Slavery,” Salmon traveled to southern U.S. plantations and captured details large and small—a bannister, a bird, wooden slats, a columned façade, branches in sunset—from past sites of slavery. Using letterpress on cotton-rag paper, she paired the pictures with texts from old diaries and books about antebellum America. Some disturbing juxtapositions result. In one work, Sugar (2016), Salmon situates a picture of a dark tree with text that reads: “The girl that mixed the poison with the / SUGAR / is one that Mr. Doherty had / lately bought. She is about / FOURTEEN / years old. She acknowledged the act / and said she done it to kill the cook woman.”
Gallerist Arnika Dawkins believes that through uniting her imagery with appropriated text, Salmon creates an “alternative reality.” The new tales unite present beauty with past horrors, a dialectical opposition that produces moving new artworks.