Photography is currently in a state of flux with artists consistently finding new ways to animate and engage with the medium in our digitally obsessed age. This was evident in the photographic art displayed at The London Art Fair demonstrating the richness and variety of both subject and process. With the addition of Art projects as well as Photo50 there was an opportunity for visitors to see both internationally regarded as well as younger photographers.

Antti Keitilä at Nordic Artworks complex process includes taking a canvas, painting on it in highly reflective paint, and then placing it in front of a landscape. He shoots the reflection and further engages with a painterly process by making each photograph unique.  At the other end of the scale were the highly constructed and digitally manipulated landscapes of Emily Allchurch at Malcolm Langley Gallery. Each of the photographic elements that complete her images has an overt meaning and is a composite record of journeys that she takes compressed into a single scene. Waiting for Inspiration (after Bellini) is both a visual reference to the painting but also her digital camera, photography referencing itself. Angela Flowers stand included Burtynsky’s landscapes of Australian mining particularly pertinent as they reference commodity and the scale of human need and consumption. The artist’s obsessive practice of taking his shots using a helicopter and specially adapted camera to get both the angle and detail result in strangely surreal landscapes. There were also illustrations of how effective pinhole photography can be at Purdy Hicks Gallery where Tom Hunter had captured Dublin Bay evoking both James Joyce’s “scrotum tightening sea” and his search to find his Irish ancestry. Ina Otzko at Eric Franck also reflected on identity with her Haunted Houses series, images of pine forests in the mist coupled with quotes from Jean Cocteau “The Difficulties of Being”. Tom Leighton’s work at Cynthia Corbett were the polar opposite, his huge cityscapes appear to be of existing places but are deconstructed cities containing composites from hundreds of images from London Berlin and Tokyo. The illusionary depth created by the innovative vantage points, architecture and vibrant colours, manufactured hyper-real illusionary scenes.

Portraiture was also well represented, Chan Hyo-Bae’s Existing in Costume were self portraits of the Korean artist dressed in Western noblewomen’s dress. His acknowledgement of Gainsborough and Reynolds and cultural coding contrasted well with Wang Wei’s portraits at Red T Art. Her carefully composed images of female workers in three star hotels sitting in the small rooms that they cleaned and serviced were often poignant. Yvonne De Rosa’s Crazy God series at Cynthia Corbett Projects, documenting an empty psychiatric hospital where she had once worked, unearths disturbing traces. Jury Rupin at Ordinary Light also allowed a glimpse into other cultures and era’s and personal journeys.

Many of the photographs included in the fair played with the notions of fact and fiction but Photo50 took this as a theme. Curated by Goldsmiths MFA students this was an opportunity to engage with the ambiguity of the medium’s ability to record and document. Highlights included Yto Barrada series Autocar, his  abstracted bus logos act as signage for illicit travellers, revealing in their codes which buses crossed borders, and resembled conceptual and Russian revolutionary paintings. John Clayman meanwhile interrogated the photographic records of art performances. His images show empty fields in black and white each re-photographed from an art book where an event has taken place, traces that visually tease us. Similarly Akram Zaatrai also appropriates, collecting and displaying vintage studio photographs taken by Hashem El Madani, a community photographer in Saida Lebanon. Reassembling the portraits to create an essay in studio photography Zaatrai creates new scenarios with coded references to Hollywood, Vogue models and Kung Fu in the poses of Saida’s residents.

Photography provides us with the opportunity to see something from a different angle or perspective, Walter Vorjohann’s Things at Braubach 5, revealed concrete barriers typically placed in front of embassies that gained monumental status when framed against a digitally manipulated pure white background. As objects these abject, often political, obstructions resembled Arp or Brancusi sculptures. Veronica Bailey’s Hours of Devotion at Malcolm Langley shot in the Angela Burdett Library at Coutts and Co revelled in the tooled leather covers of books using cropping to give particular significance to their spines. By removing the titles but leaving the gold embossed decoration and faded marks of time and use she plays with both references to knowledge but also the abstract paintings of Rothko and Barnett Newman.

As Marcel Duchamp stated the creative act is not performed by the artists alone and at The London Art Fair it was both the carefully curated stands and eyewitness participation by viewers that completed the photographs’ journey.