Chasing photography: our favorites in this last edition of Art New York

Presented by Art Miami, the fourth, rich, and eagerly anticipated edition of Art New York, landed on the industrial spaces of Pier 94, showcasing a fresh and overarching view of works by 1,200 renewed and emergent worldwide artists from the contemporary, modern, post-war and pop eras.

The show, on view Thursday, May 3rd through Sunday, May 6th, proudly brought together 95 galleries from 30 countries, and eclectically inspired artists, collectors and dealers with a museum-like scenography, featuring diverse media such as photography, prints, drawings, design and sculpture.

In the spotlight, selected pieces from David Hockney, Josef Albers, Alexander Calder, Jean Michel Basquiat, Pablo Picasso, Roy Lichtenstein, Damien Hirst, Marc Chagall, Donald Judd, Ed Ruscha, Donald Sultan, Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Edward Hopper, Keith Haring, Frank Stella, Anish Kapoor, Gavin Turk and more.

Here what we loved in our hunt for photography

As for the Vintage selection, the Canadian Nikola Rukaj Gallery thrilled us, showcasing a joyful carousel of silver gelatin prints from the 50s, signed Jerry Schatzberg. The photographs were cleverly and harmoniously displayed along with selected paintings by Malcom Liepke, in a ravishing, aesthetically pleasing match.

Malcolm Liepke - American Girl, oil on canvas

Malcolm Liepke - Polka Dots, oil on canvas

In the mood for abstraction, Cynthia Reeves chose the minimalism of the German artist Georg Güttinger. Splintering the bounds between painting and photography, the vertical formalism of Waterfall (2017), drove us towards an imaginary path where landscapes and dimensions are artificially reduced to a painterly experience made of abstract lines and primary colors, achieving a perfect perception of weightlessness.

Courtesy of Cynthia Reeves and Georg Güttinger, Waterfall, 2017

The Atlanta based gallery, Connect Contemporary, invested instead in the visionary talent of the Iranian photographer Pezhman. The artist, author of the stunning series Budoir, joined the show with unique, highly treated, dreamlike pieces from his last production. As experimental as classic, the aesthetic of Siren Song and Cymopoleia (2018) perpetuate Pezhman's visual inquiry upon the plasticity of movement, as enhanced by the antigravity action of the water: a reoccurring pattern continuing the voluptuous impressionism of the series Aqueous. Pezham is an authentic, innovative, conceptual artisan of actual Beauty. Each chapter of his impressive and hybrid portfolio is the embodiment of an innate devotion to imagery that he evocatively brings to expression by drawing upon his technical mastery and his superior understanding of the rules of composition.

Iranian photography was equally honored by the French 55Bellechasse. The Gallery vastly highlighted the autobiographic work of Niloufar Banisadr. If large room was given to her declarative, iconic sequence of autoportraits, we have been rather blown away by the silent beauty of abstracts photographs from the series The imprint (2010), Sexy Window (2012), and Hymen (2016). In these works the artist delivers authentic, highly intimate and abstract compositions, invisibly staging her presence through elegant, emotionally powerful, captivating images.

The same intimate language, was evidently tangible overall the realistic, large scale made, and highly defined work of the Italian artist Fabiano Parisi (Cynthia Corbett Gallery). Selected photographs from the series Il mondo che non vedo (The world I do not see) and Empire of light, witness Parisi's pilgrimages around the world, in search of abandoned and decaying architectural interiors and exteriors resurrected through the camera. These highly detailed, slightly saturated images are governed by a dihcotomic aesthetic where the prevailing decadence is the visible trace of an invisible forgotten scenic splendor.

Rita Murray

Cedric Roux: Before Rebirth

By Cedric Roux

Publisher : ODYSSEE

2024 | 96 pages

Empty storefronts dot the downtown, while massive brick tobacco warehouses stretch the length of city blocks—abandoned and awaiting creative reuse. Wilson, North Carolina, feels frozen in the 1970s. Invited by the Eye on Main Street festival, photographer Cedric Roux made several trips to this enigmatic town. For a photographer used to capturing the vibrant energy of New York City streets—his first book, My Wonderland (now sold out), vividly chronicled the bustling metropolis—his initial encounter with Wilson was a profound shock.

Expecting a town in the midst of a vibrant renaissance, Roux wandered Wilson daily, exploring its diverse areas: downtown, affluent suburbs, and struggling neighborhoods. On either side of the railroad tracks that symbolically and socially divide the city, he sought a light that might suggest an emerging revival..

In his latest book, Before Rebirth, Roux captures this sense of disconnection, using his lens to explore a promise not yet realized. With a population of just 47,000, Wilson is a far cry from Manhattan’s 1.5 million. Used to the dense human energy that fuels his photographic style, Roux found himself reimagining his approach. His work took on a more stripped-down, documentary aesthetic, yet it remains deeply rooted in place and retains the distinctive palette and framing that define his vision..

In collaboration with artistic director Jean-Matthieu Gautier, Roux drew from his imagination and visual archives to craft a narrative that stays true to his photographic roots while stepping far beyond his usual realm.

All About Cedric Roux

John Divola: San Fernando Valley

By John Divola

Publisher : Nazraeli Press

2024 | 60 pages

From the publisher: San Fernando Valley is where John Divola was born and raised, and it served as both backdrop and subject for his earliest, serious photographic explorations, made during the early 1970s. This previously unpublished body of work shows “the Valley” through the eyes of a young photographer who would soon become an internationally-recognized artist with the exhibition and publication of his much more conceptual “Zuma” series. The black and white photographs in “San Fernando Valley” comprise a series of subject groupings which, pulled together, show early manifestations of the deadpan humor and the ability to capture everyday scenes wrapped in loneliness, for which Divola is now well-known. The book is also, and not incidentally, a fascinating record of a quintessentially 1970s Los Angeles culture. John Divola’s work is the subject of numerous books and catalogues. Widely exhibited and collected throughout the United States, Europe, Japan and Australia, Divola’s photographs are included in the permanent collections of many public and private institutions, including those of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

All About John Divola

Cig Harvey: Emerald Drifters

By Cig Harvey

Publisher : The Monacelli Press

2025 | 224 pages

Following her celebrated monograph Blue Violet (Monacelli, 2021), photographer Cig Harvey continues her personal study of sensory experience, focusing on the ephemeral nature of light, pigment, and vision. Her latest photographs are lush tableaux of her signature subjects – flora, cakes, domestic interiors, and the human figure in landscape – accompanied by prose vignettes on the science and art of color, written in her vibrant, intimate style. Featuring an afterword by award-winning novelist and poet Ocean Vuong, Emerald Drifters is a catalogue of pleasures and heartbreaks, and ‘an urgent call to live.’

All About Cig Harvey

Helmut Newton. Berlin, Berlin

By Helmut Newton

Publisher : Taschen

2025 | 244 pages

Born in Berlin in 1920, Helmut Newton trained as a teenager with legendary photographer Yva, following her lead into the enticing pastures of fashion, portraiture and nudes. Forced to flee the Nazis aged only 18, Newton never left Berlin behind. After his career exploded in Paris in the 1960s, he returned regularly to shoot for magazines like Constanze, Adam, Vogue, Condé Nast's Traveler, ZEITmagazin, Männer Vogue, Max and the Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin as well as his own magazine Helmut Newton’s Illustrated. In 1979, the newly relaunched German Vogue commissioned him to retrace the footsteps of his youth to capture the fashion moment. The resulting portfolio, Berlin, Berlin!, inspired the title of the exhibition which celebrates 20 years of the Helmut Newton Foundation. This collection includes Newton’s most iconic Berlin images, as well as many unknown shots from the 1930s to the 2000s: nightcrawlers in uber-cool clubs and restaurants, nude portraits in the boarding houses he knew from his youth, and the Berlin film scene, featuring Hanna Schygulla and Wim Wenders at the Berlin Wall, John Malkovich and David Bowie. In October 2003, only months before his death, Newton moved large parts of his archive to his new foundation, housed in the Museum of Photography beside the Zoologischer Garten station―the very station from which he fled Berlin in the winter of 1938. This publication thus closes a circle in the story of his extraordinary life and work.

Chasing photography: our favorites in this last edition of Art New York

Art New York Fair

Selected Books