At AIPAD: More Galleries and a Discovery

  I love going the to annual AIPAD (Association of International Photography Art Dealers) show in New York. In my job I go to a lot of trade shows, most of them about cameras and consumer electronics. Art shows are far more agreeable.

No matter what kind of trade show you’re at, you get asked the same question over and over at each booth you visit: “How’s the show for you?” I’m never sure what this question means. Have I seen anything interesting? Have I accomplished anything profitable while walking the aisles? I think people are just asking about my general impressions of the show and, therefore, of the state of the industry. Or in the case of AIPAD, the state of the photographic art market.

For the record, here are my impressions from this year’s show, which ran last Wednesday through Sunday: More, bigger, better. And I made a discovery I’m very excited about. The photographer’s name is Dennis Callwood, whose work you see here.

There were a lot art galleries represented this year that I’ve never heard of—especially the ones from Europe. AIPAD really is international now. I can’t testify as to how lively the buying and selling was. When I walked the show at the end of the day on Thursday the aisles weren’t particularly crowded. I did overhear two well known dealers talking about the traffic, though: “There are a lot more photographers walking around here chatting up potential galleries than there are buyers looking for art,” said one. To which the other dealer could only wanly agree.

It was at the booth of dealer Charles Isaacs that I discovered Callwood, who, unusually, has degrees in sociology from the University of California at Santa Cruz and an MFA in photography from the University of Southern California. He is employed as a parole officer for the Los Angeles Country prison system, for which he counsels and teaches inmates and parolees in life skills and the arts.

As part of this work, Callwood has made portraits of many of the gang members he works with. He takes the portraits back into the prisons, where his subjects “tag” and writer their own stories on the images. He then creates frames to hold the enlarged images, and the frames are also tagged with graffiti by gang members.

The results are more than interesting sociologically—they can be absolutely captivating visually.
—David Schonauer

Comments

[WILLIAM PHILLIPS]

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[WILLIAM PHILLIPS]

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[WILLIAM PHILLIPS]

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