NEW YORK—There was “great energy” at last night’s sold-out gala preview for this year’s AIPAD Photography Show, according to the three ladies manning Pace/MacGill’s booth today, and they’d be the ones to know. The 57th Street gallery boasts one of the best locations at the fair (it’s the first booth you’ll see), which they’ve filled with a selection of images by the late MoMA curator John Szarkowski as well as a few other vintage treasures.

Pace also boasts one of the fair’s most expensive works, as far as ARTINFO could tell: Man Ray’s Le retour a la raison (Return to Reason), a 1923 vintage silver gelatin print going for $900,000. That bested another top-tier highlight just across the aisle, a pristine vintage print of Edward Weston’s Shell (1927), going for $750,000 at Edwynn Houk Gallery’s booth.  

The vintage dealers, according to Gitterman Gallery’s Elena John, had been “waiting to see what would happen at the auctions” and were encouraged by the results. Gitterman is offering a Weston Nude Oceano (1936) for $400,000, which John says is much more pristine than the similar Nude on the Sand, Oceano (1936) that sold at Sotheby’s for $325,000, smashing pre-auction estimates of $120-180,000.

But neither these iconic works nor similarly priced masterpieces by Edward Steichen and Irving Penn at San Francisco’s Michael Shapiro Gallery had sold as of this writing, despite reports from several gallerists that vintage works are easier to sell at openings than their contemporary counterparts.

Virginia Zabriskie of New York’s Zabriskie Gallery said she hadn’t sold any of her contemporary offerings — charming costumed self-portraits by Japanese photographer and shapeshifter Tomoko Sawada — at the opening. The dealer explained that she’s “not sure people buy contemporary work at openings,” since it’s “a lot more difficult to sell editioned work at an opening because it doesn’t have the buzz of a unique work.”

Aside from the exceptional prints like the Weston and Man Ray, the offerings generating the most buzz — or at least the most attention — seemed to be the contemporary ones, though everyone ARTINFO spoke with seemed confident about the level of interest in all the works, even if there were few early sales to report.

Some of the most innovative work could be found at Silverstein Photography’s booth, where Bruce Silverstein raved about lawyer-cum-emerging artist Maria Antoinetta Mameli, an exhibition of whose work will inaugurate the gallery’s new 20th Street space dedicated to promoting emerging artists and opening April 17. The gallery had three digital C-prints, priced from $2,500 to $3,500, each presenting a tiny black and red figure — a man on a bike carrying red shopping bags, a dog-walker with red leashes — on a swath of pristine white. Two sold opening night.

Also on view at Silverstein was a gorgeous 2006 print of water and ink meeting in a kind of midair explosion by Japanese newcomer Shinichi Maruyama, who’ll have a solo show at the gallery in the fall, as well as an installation of six works by Zoe Strauss, an emerging artist who’s made her name photographing the down-and-out in her South Philadelphia neighborhood. Strauss had her first solo show at the gallery last summer and will present another next December. Neither of these had sold as of this writing.

On the other side of the fair, Hasted Hunt is also showing some experimental work, most significantly the abstract creations of 30-something, German-born newcomer Andreas Gefeller, who works as a kind of human scanner. For Untitled (Office Ceiling) Düsseldorf (2007) for example, he painstakingly photographed every square inch of the ceiling of a giant office facility, then synthesized the photographs into a 58-by-110-inch composite. Not quite as monumental, but more lyrical, is the 50-by-50-inch digital C-print Untitled (Leaves), Düsseldorf (2007), which uses the same process to capture a sunburst of fallen yellow ginkgo leaves on green grass. These works were priced at $19,500 and $11,000 respectively. Neither sold during the preview, though several others of the artist’s work did.