After a stint in a soulless Midtown Manhattan space last year, the world’s longest-running photo fair returns this weekend with a 77-exhibitor lineup at the much less insipid Park Avenue Armory. From overlooked Polaroids to glossy celebrity portraits to manipulated images that grapple with painful personal histories, the show presented by the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) packs a punch.
Visitors are immediately met by Sarah Sense’s woven photographs at the entrance-facing booth of Bruce Silverstein Gallery. A member of the Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana and the Choctaw Nation, Sense weaves contemporary images of Oklahoma with historical maps and manuscripts, entangling the histories that shaped her family’s reservation into physical representations of the ever-present nature of colonial violence. Lewis and Clark’s travel journals and a 1902 allotment map are folded into scenic landscape photographs, all arranged in the pattern of a traditional basket created by the artist’s great-great-grandmother.
“These are all divided by the number of people in the family, blood quantum, and age,” the gallery’s associate director, Milly Cai, told me on opening day, gesturing toward the undulated slivers of the map. “It’s a violent document.” She pointed to a line noting an 11-year-old child. Other scribbled records indicate whether people were “full” or “half” Native, statuses that determined how much land they were “allotted” by the government.
