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Once inside, a strong show revealed itself, with more international galleries than in years past, including one from Moscow. And interesting showings from local stalwarts such as Michael Hoppen, Museum 52 and Riflemaker had the check books out moments after the door opened.

“I can’t believe it—we have already sold one of Tom Gallant’s works” said one of the Museum 52 gang 15 minutes after the fair had opened.

Later, I bumped into Vanessa Branson, the collector (and sister of Virgin’s Richard Branson), who owned up to being the proud new owner of one of Gallant’s decoupage-on-Perspex bird pieces.

This year, Photo-London was fairly evenly divided between ancient, modern and contemporary photographs.

Ancient and modern were splendidly represented on Galerie Sergei Plantureux’s stand with a series of wonderful landscape photographs by the l9th-century pioneer, Eugene Disderi and, tucked into a corner, beautiful plant studies by Dora Maar—which surprised me, as I never knew she took photographs. These plant studies looked remarkably like certain paintings by Max Ernst.

Ancient, but still living, was Michael Hoppen’s new discovery: the 80-year-old Miroslav Tichy, who photographed the inhabitants of the Czech city of Brno from the ’60s to the ’90s using home-made cameras constructed from found objects.

Similar in his obvious love of life, love and eccentricity to Lartigue—with whom he is sharing an exhibition at the Michael Hoppen Gallery—Tichy’s images look as if they were taken in the l9th, not the 20th century, which could be a comment on the stringencies of life in Czechoslovakia during the Soviet years.

As a complete contrast, that very successful gallery Riflemaker was showing films without light by Juan Fontanive. These are flip-book animations housed in the mechanical parts of clocks and pushbikes—interesting objects in their own right. Fontanive hand draws characters and scenery on many neat layers of pages and the result is somewhere between film and sculpture.

Make a note of the Riflemaker gallery: It always has very unusual and challenging shows under the direction of owner Tot Taylor and Virginia Damsta—many of which, like its recent “The Secret Art of William Burroughs”—have strong literary associations. So I was not surprised to learn that Fontanive had worked with contemporary poets and writers in St. Petersburg on broken/non-standard narratives.

And speaking of Russia, from Moscow came Yakut—at 1,000 square meters, one of the largest galleries in Europe—which is owned by Alexander Yakut, artist, curator, gallerist and architect (Phew!). Yakut was showing works by… Mr. Yakut himself. These were very large and intense images of flowers and nudes in skyscapes which I thought packed a punch.

There was also a Yakut magazine on sale—a limited edition going for £100 to those who were interested (of which there were not many as it was set in Cyrillic). But keep an eye on this gallery. I went on to its website afterward (www.yakutgallery.ru), and it has some rather interesting artists.

There were disappointments: Chinese contemporary photographs in the show looked derivative and, frankly, not cutting-edge.

Early to mid-20th-century images (Dora Maar apart) looked overly familiar, especially the fashion images from the 1950s. I missed the shock of surprise, for instance, when looking at the William Eggleston work on the Rose Gallery of Los Angeles—a view which was not shared by the visitor who bought one for £95,000.

With visitors estimated at 25 percent up over last year, and with a really good roster of surrounding events, including Christie’s first-ever Rare Photobooks sale, in which Brassai’s original maquette for the first edition of Graffiti (l960) fetched the top price of £159,200 (on an estimate of £20-30,000), Photo-London looks a very good new fixture on the London art calendar.