The Park Avenue Armory becomes a sprawling gallery of visual experimentation this week as Aipad: The Photography Show opens its doors to more than 70 galleries. The exhibition, running April 22-26, pulls together work spanning decades and continents, from Bill Brandt's provocative 1952 nudes to contemporary pieces that blur photography with embroidery, oil paint and found objects.
Brandt's influence hovers over the collection. The British photographer's career arc, which began in Vienna in 1927 when he sought treatment for a lung condition, took him into literary circles and wartime documentation before pivoting toward his most recognized body of work: transforming the female form through radical angles and framings. His legacy appears alongside artists pushing photography into entirely new territories.
Some works deconstruct photography itself. Andy Mattern's "ghost" series emerges from the back of forgotten photographs pressed against surfaces, creating accidental double exposures that Mattern describes as evidence of pictures reproducing themselves. Bill Armstrong's blurred color abstractions push the opposite direction, photographed so out of focus that his camera's infinity setting becomes the subject.
Gregory Crewdson represents photography as full-scale theatrical production, orchestrating lighting crews and actors to create psychologically loaded scenes. His large-format work has the weight of cinema compressed into still images. Keith Carter works in the opposite vein, capturing dreamlike moments of vernacular life that distill essence rather than spectacle.
Gender and identity shape much of what's on display. Zanele Muholi documents South Africa's LGBTQ+ communities with the precision of a visual activist, while Pia Paulina Guilmoth channels her trans working-class experience and Maine riverside life into photographs that collapse the personal and the transcendent. Tania Franco Klein examines the anxieties of online existence through self-portraiture. Joan Lyons challenges photography's traditional conventions through a feminist lens drawn from daily observation.
Mixed-media approaches abound. Eloïse Labarbe-Lafon hand-colors black-and-white prints with oil paint applied by brush or fingertip. Sissi Farassat blends photography with embroidery and beadwork, treating images as objects to be layered and embellished. Rania Matar, born in Lebanon and now based in the US, centers women's experiences across adolescence and adulthood.
The exhibition draws internationally. Lee Hsu-Pin from Taiwan explores mountains he had never encountered. Miguel Rio Branco brings Brazilian social critique and political commentary through Magnum Photos. Julio Le Parc interrogates the boundary between art and society using abstraction and audience questionnaires.
Landscape photographers stake their claim too. Ruth Thorne-Thomsen evokes mythology and psychology through images of alternative worlds. Patty Carroll stages saturated tableaux of identity and domestic life. Lenard Smith combines photography with assemblage and field recording to explore architecture as an ongoing mediation of experience.
Author James Rodriguez: "Photography's doing more interesting work when it stops trying to document the world and starts treating the medium itself as the playground."
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