[SIC] DAY THREE HUNDRED TWENTY THREE

Vol. 3, No. 42. Unlocked🔓

Apr 29, 2025

[SIC] DAY THREE HUNDRED TWENTY THREE

Photo: Tom Arndt

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the answer to life, the universe, and everything is 42. As I was telling Ochuko yesterday, I’m still figuring out the meaning of the daily email. That said things are maybe falling into place. It’s feeling like grabbing a single item- like today’s news that The Photography Show fair in New York set a new attendance record this year in its run at the Park Ave Armory - and then expanding on corollary topics could be my metier. Let’s give it try.

Ok, so The Photography Show; I was invited to stop by courtesy of the folks at Alma Communications (s/o Andrew & Hannah); though I am a photo fan and sometime-accumulator of images I was unfamiliar previously with the show. Marcella and I headed up on Saturday to have a gander / wander.

Art fairs like TPS are necessarily overwhelming; we ran into a friend of Marcella’s on the way in and she gave us an inkling: She’d planned to hit the fair every day from VIP Preview to close, because she’d see something new every time she walked through. And it was a good place to hunt for a next husband; creatively-inclined, possibly wealthy.

My experience was similar, next husband notwithstanding. Everyone’s a potential buyer and nobody’s taste is universal, so dealers basically have to mix and match styles, artists and eras and hope to hit the widest cross section of appeal. Tricky. Easier for the book publishers; they’ve got only what they made to include.

We saw a bunch of things we liked - some images follow here uncredited (I didn’t write artists’ names down ) - and some collections that were thematically interesting. But it wasn’t until we ended up lingering around the Atelier EXB booth and noticing the quiet man sitting behind a “Book Signing: Tom Arndt. 2PM” that we landed on something worth leaving the fair with.

Photo: Tom Arndt

Not the man, obviously. Tom Arndt wasn’t a photographer whose name I recognized, but his book “American Reflections” grabbed both Marcella and me. He’s been capturing every day scenes in Minneapolis (and Chicago and NY and other places) since the 1970s - the book text compares him to Lee Friedlander; I get Gary Winogrand and Vivian Maier too. Which is to say; early to follow in Robert Frank’s footsteps documenting the funny, weird, cruel and sometimes sublime ways America’s been made. No judgement to speak of, just noticing.

tom-ardnt-american-reflections-exibart-street-photography-03

Photo: Tom Arndt

Anyway - Tom was there, awaiting folks to buy books and ask for a dedication, which we did. Lovely guy. We paid in Euros (45) because that’s what Atelier EXB required; a deal for a well-produced monograph to spend the afternoon dissecting once home.

Photo of an Eggleston photo.

The popularity of the photo show this year made me think of visiting the NADA fair it returns May 7-11 this year, incidentally), not long after Trump was elected. My ‘other’ Marcella - Zimmermann, a former colleague and now boss of Digital Counsel - had invited me. I asked her for favorites, and she explained that classic styles - figurative paintings, portraiture etc - were the wave; uncertainty about what was coming from the White House meant a flight to safety, aestethically. I’d say (judging by the Amy Sherald show up right now) that she was on point.

It makes me think a similar thing is maybe happening with photography right now. The ultimate objective form - WYSIWYG literally, except when it's not (s/o PICTURES, the photo abstraction survey from a couple years back by [SIC] homie Ken Miller).